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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

> Four years later and the model had been discontinued

Which model? Was it the FP1? It sounds like your friend was extremely unlucky - FP2 is 11 years old & there's still (a limited subset of) parts for sale for it (display & camera). FP3 (7yo model) still has all the parts for sale.

That said - I'm critical of another aspect of device longevity: software support. I upgraded from my (still working) FP3 to the FP5 because apps I needed stopped working on the highest version of Android supported by FP3. That Android version is still officially supported by Fairphone & receiving security updates but without major version upgrades the app support can be problematic. Obviously that's ultiamtely the fault of bad app devs, but ultimately it's hard to overcome.

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>ultimately the fault of bad app devs

More like google's fault. They made a huge mess of completely different permission and behaviour changes between 11, 12, 13. At least since 14 they have stopped fucking around so much.

It is really much simpler for us to cut off all versions before 12, but it's unfeasible. So many devices still with 10/11. Now we cut off at 8.1, but will increase that every year starting next year as google mandates us an increase of minimum sdk version.

I don't like how companies behave like that and basically push users to upgrade their phones

Garmin in particular makes it mandatory to use their app for SOME connected functionalities (while others work just fine on wifi or wifi tethering). They unsupported old version of android for the garmin connect app pretty fast (my mom's phone was incompatible within 4 years of its release) while they don't support you to connect older devices on newer phones and say they know it doesn't work.

As a user, I don't care whose fault it is.

I ditched both Google in favour of degooglized android on older Xiaomi and Pixel phones that support custom ROMs, and Garmin for any sport equipment.

My next phone will be a Fairphone if they make something with a smaller screen.

I don't know which app you're doing, but I would most likely permanently just not download it or find an open source alternative if it stopped working for me, as no app is essential. Pay attention to the user-base, in particular is your app is supposed to work with a web of users.

While i always try to look for open source utility apps (i use several), our userbase simply don't care.

Context: Our apps are means to connect to our devices via BLE, are free and without ads (fuck ads, fuck all ads), no integrity checks. We don't publish the API but we know of a couple of clients that reverse engineered the protocol and made their own. Good for them. (one of them also came by the office to bring a friend and showed us his app that glued together the functionality of several modules from also our competitors. Cool!)

But given what we do our customers are complete normies, doing what google asks us is the path of least resistance, and gets us most audience.

Those who don't want to use the play store can find the APK in the usual sites, don't care.

If i made app for myself i would indeed distribute it differently.

I haven't done Android dev in a while, but I remember the Android SDK offered a 'backwards compatibility pack' - you selected which version you wanted to target, and how old a version you wanted to support (you could go back to like android 5) and it gave you all the polyfills necessary. The only downside was that your app size would balloon to crazy levels.

It's more or less what minimumsdk does, but there may be libraries that require you to bump the minimum.

For example, there are APIs that make feasible something that should be trivial (like autosizing a font based on size, the way it happens in iOS) but they are available from 8.0 so you cut out anything below that.

Or, we use BLE a lot and there are newer methods that makes our life easier but again are not available in older SDK versions

That "officially supported" comes with a huge asterisk though. Security bulletins for old android versions already only include backports of high severity patches. On top of that the device also gets no security patches for firmware or kernel, as the hardware and kernel are eol. The FP5 is also on an eol kernel after less than 3 years, not that they were providing kernel updates in the first place. https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...

What apps?

I use a FP3 too, but I am a little surprised

I don't know for fair phone but I was not able to install tailscale for my old Samsung Galaxy S2 tablet. Fortunately I was able to install an XDA rom

Banking. It's always banking.

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