Other than your carrier give it for free or cheap, I don’t really see the reason why should you buy new phone. I’ve been using Redmi Note 9 for past 3 years and recently got my had on Poco F5. I don’t see the point of my ‘upgrade’. I sold it and come back to my Note 9. Gaming? Most of them are p2w or microtransaction garbage or just gimped version of its PC/Console counterpart. I mean, $400 still get you PS4, TV and Switch if you don’t mind buying used. At least here where I live. Storage? Dude, newer phone wont even let you have SD Card. Features? Well, all I see is newer phones take more features than it adds. Headphone jack, more ads, and repairability are to name a few. Battery? Just replace them. However, my Note 9 still get through day with one 80% charge in the dawn. Which takes 1 hour.
I am genuinely curious why newer phone always selling like hot cakes. Since there’s virtually no difference between 4gb of RAM and 12gb of RAM, or 12mp camera and 100mp camera on phone.
I have Android 7 and Jerboa {the official Lemmy app) requires Android 8 or higher. So people told me to upgrade but I wasn’t having that. It turns out there is a fork with Android 6 and 7 support that might get merged into mainline, so my phone will be cool for a while longer. But the upgrade pressure is out there.
You can use the web version and hold on to your phone even longer 😉
I had trouble with the web version but it works now so I’m using it. I’ll try Jerboa again sometime. I had to uninstall the 0.17 fork I was using after lemmy.world upgraded it’s backend.
Android 7 is quite old though, isn’t there any custom ROM development for your phone? I know there are downsides but it’s usually been fine for me
I am not sure of the custom room situation but I use this phone every day so I don’t want to mess with it. I can consider it if I get a new phone while the old one still works.