That's not unique to Android. I still use an old iPad 3 (stuck on iOS 9) for movies & audiobooks in bed. I can still use Netflix, Plex, & Audible because I downloaded them a long time ago. But I recently switched to 1Password and I can't install it on that iPad.
I don’t think iPad 3 is even “old”. I have an original iPad 1, and the situation is even worse: I’m frozen in time on iOS 5, and the device has been losing app availability for years. Without jail breaking, it can basically only do what was installed with it from the factory. The hardware itself outlasts most companies’ software support by 2-4X. I see a bleak future of millions of perfectly usable devices that are only unusable because developers decided to stop keeping their software compatible.
Contrast that with the world of PCs where I can still run recent versions of Linux on devices 10-20 years old.
> where I can still run recent versions of Linux on devices 10-20 years old.
10 sure, but not 20. 20 years ago the devices had 32 bit CPUs, the support for them is being phased out. The last 32-bit Ubuntu LTS is 16.04.6, from 2016.
Ubuntu 16.04 is still receiving updates - unlike typical Android phones from the same era.
While you might not get the latest kernel with it, as far as I can tell, there is nothing in its package manager that doesn't run on hardware from 2016.
Unkike typical Android devices from the same era.
> as I can tell, there is nothing in its package manager that doesn't run on hardware from 2016.
Right, but 20 years ago was 1999. I won’t be surprised to find out many packages won’t work: that CPU doesn’t have SSE2, the RAM limit is 512 MB, and typical systems usually had 64 or 128 MB.
The official page says recommended minimum requirements for Ubuntu 16.04 are 2 GHz dual core processor with 2GB RAM. 20 years old PCs don’t fit.
I wonder about the level of VAX support. Do they just have old code lying in the repository, do they build it, or do the devs actually have a working VAX machine and they test new builds?
Not a dev, but as i understand it as a Vaxstation 4000 owner who boots up from time to time to enjoy the beeps:
a) build.sh allows cross compilation, which helps with build validation
(although openbsd built native until they dropped vax ~3y ago)
b) there are a few dedicated devs on vax. these pretty much do the work as a hobby,
and things are best effort, but generally in sync with the rest of the tree. most
of these own a vax or three, but you can also run on SimH and probably other
vax emulators.
c) really, the system source is modular enough that adjusting device drivers for well
documented hardware which has existed for years, and tweaking a few
already-implemented since the 80s macro primitives is most of what is needed to
keep things running -most of the adjustments to the system itself happen higher
up the stack (e.g in the generic c portion of the kernel, or in the c library).
Granted, this does mean knowing the ISA and HW in and out, and having skills to
debug/reason about low-level instruction/hardware sorts of issues, but, hey,
that's who codes open source os'es anyway.. Besides, if you are a true VAX BSD UNIX hacker,
you've been tweaking your kernel sources since you manually toggled in the 3BSD bootstrap
in 1979 :b
That’s what happened with desktop PCs when design progress (or deliberate gradualism some would say) obsoleted machines over the course of several months.
Same happened with mobile devices, where designers and manufacturers were looking for the ideal recipe of a mobile phone.
Can you still access the App Store? A few years ago in 2017 I found my old iPhone 3GS in a drawer. I fired it up and it still connected to the App Store, and I was able to download some apps I'd bought back in the day. Even some apps that hadn't been updated or available for newer devices for years, including Lemonade Stand, an old favourite. It was great seeing my kinds play that on my old Phone.
I got my daughter a newer device later that year, so don't know if it still works. I've lost track of it again.
According to 1Password's support forum, "1Password 6 supports 1Password.com accounts, and that will run on iOS 9 and 10"[1].
The iPad 3 was quite problematic as a device in that it was very RAM- and CPU-limited. With a 1GHz dual-core A9 and 1GB RAM, it was not going to handle future iOS updates well.
The next version, the 2012 iPad, runs iOS 10 and is still useful -- I still have one lying around for when I need an iPad (and I do have 1Password on it). And the 2013 iPad Air runs the latest iOS and I expect this to continue as iPad tech plateaus.
Lack of OS updates isn't unique to Android, but Android manufacturers collectively have a very blasé attitude to updates, much worse than Apple and Microsoft.
