The 0.18 version of Lemmy was announced. This will solve many issues.
But we can’t upgrade yet because the captcha was removed, and captcha relied on Websockets, which are removed in 0.18 so despite the devs agreeing on my request to add captcha back, this will not be until 0.18.1. Without captcha we will be overrun by bots.
Hopefully this 0.18.1 will be released soon, because another issue is that the newest version of the Jerboa app won’t work with servers older than 0.18. So if you’re on Lemmy.world, please (temporarily) use another app or the web version.
By keeping backwards compatibility that far back you give up on a large set of features. My guess is that Jerboa needed some feature that only exists from Android 8 and above and they didn’t want to reinvent wheels.
Probably it would be best if you try to get a used phone with an more up to date Android version.
I’ve gotten to the point that I think that any new software release of something like Android or Firefox is likely to make it worse than before. Reddit was another example. So I resist. What feature could they possibly want from Android 8 that wasn’t in earlier versions? If it was the dev kit (Jetpack) then I can sort of understand, but Android 7 has plenty of user level features, and apps such as RedReader that work fine. I’d be delighted with a RedReader port for Lemmy.
The idea of buying another phone and making more e-waste just to deal with version churn is distasteful to me. I might get interested if I can find a phone that supports Lineage really well, but otherwise I’d rather keep using what I have until it falls apart (it is getting there).
Thanks though.
I guess it’s time for you to get into app development and find out firsthand.> I might get interested if I can find a phone that supports Lineage really well
Literally every single Google phone. Get a second hand last gen one if you’re actually about reducing e-waste and that’s not just an excuse.
If you mean the new Android 8 features only matter to developers, I guess I can sympathize with the Jerboa devs choosing to use them if it really made the dev work easier. From a user perspective though, Android 7 does everything I need, and RedReader shows that a Reddit viewer app can work fine in Android 7. I can’t think of anything a Lemmy app needs to do that a Reddit app doesn’t, though maybe I’m missing something.
I don’t particularly want to become an Android app developer. That’s sort of like becoming a Windows developer. I use Android basically due to lack of alternatives. 3g networks around here are now all shut down, so my Maemo phones are useless as phones, even if they weren’t intolerably slow.
Reasonable point about Google phones, but they don’t have headphone jacks (since the Pixel 4A which is the main one I have any interest in) and from what I can tell, battery replacement is difficult. So I’m hoping to keep using my current phone until phones with those EU-mandated swappable batteries appear.
As mentioned I think my current thought is to write an alternative web front end that is text only. We need something like that anyway.