1y ago

The official reddit app is not even supported on my device.

Well i am certainly not using reddit on my tablet anymore.

Lemmy Moment @lemmy.world

Reddit bad because "my tablet is too shitty for trash Reddit app"

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What is that app possibly made of that it cant run on literally anything? It's just an app for text and images. I dont get it, is it optimized like an actual potato?
- is it optimized like an actual potato?
  Back when it was still in beta, it went through a period where it drained my battery from 100% to dead in under 30 minutes.
  Just by being installed, not even actually using it.
  
  Facebook still does this to me. I log in via Web app now.
- Could be a library or feature that the devs didn't consider worth maintaining on older devices.
  For context, the OP appears to be using Android 5 or 5.1, released in 2014/2015 respectively and is used on 1.1-1.3% devices worldwide.
  
  What a stupid anti-human shit, I hate it. All my devices from 10 years ago are still perfectly fine and operational, and I can't use them because of some people's laziness. They are used on 1% devices not because they are necessarily bad or broken but because it's impossible to use them now for arbitrary reasons.
  
  This really has nothing to do with being lazy, a lot of modern software just straight up isn't supported anymore on such old systems. Making it compatible and testing it on those old platforms makes no business sense at all. Far too expensive with little to no benefit overall.
  If anyone is to blame here it's the phone manufacturers that don't provide updates to those devices.
  
  Exactly. Rag on Reddit all you want, but a company maintaining compatibility with an almost 10 year old OS version is a bit much.
  
  Windows 8.1 Release: October 17, 2013 Windows 8 EoL: January 10, 2023
  
  Exactly, they EOL it after 10 years. And that's MICROSOFT. Reddit is smaller by many orders of magnitude.
  If anything, backward compatibility is Google's fault.
  
  Bingo. For a lot of devices, especially anything made after 2015-ish, there's no real reason why mid to high-end devices couldn't be running the most recent OS version outside of "it's a lot of work to certify updates for so many devices". Thankfully Android has a custom ROM scene which keeps devices going for a few years longer.
  
  I've never seen such an aggressive take on maintaining backwards compatibility haha
  
  Well, true. But it is more reasonable to hate the manufacturer who refused to update, not the app devs who would have to do more work for small gain. Or unofficially update your own device, if possible.
  
  I'm not hating on the developers, I'm hating on the whole situation
  
  Mobile devices have become like 20x more powerful in the last 10 years lol. Found my Dad's old Galaxy S3 while cleaning the house, and it was still in working condition. Just soo freaking slow cause all the websites and were made for better hardware.
  
  Yeah, except for the fact that modern Samsung s20 is not really that much more powerful than your s3. Sure it has more RAM, significantly more, but the processor is barely twice as good.
  10 years old device has plenty power to run whatever website can offer, apart from maybe some battery degradation. Hell, I have 20 years old laptop that can do that. The reason it doesn't is not technical, it's almost exclusively economical, by which I mean "lazy cheap bastards don't give a flying fuck about the mountains of e-waste we produce"
  
  This is just an ignorant take on things. The S20 has like 4x the core count, and each one of those is at least 2x as energy efficient, and 4x more powerful.
  
  No way the S20 is only slightly more powerful than an S3. If you're not using any CPU intensive apps, such as games, then yeah, you aren't going to see a massive difference. My S7 still runs well enough for browsing, music, and videos, but my S10 will run circles around it if I actually leverage its capabilities.
  
  One of the reasons is security, older Android APIs let your apps do whatever they want. You probably could try to find an apk that would work on older devices, but google has minimal API requirements that involve permissions and data access, and if your app doesn't support them it wont be allowed on the Play Store. So even if devs supported other devices, you wouldn't find the app on the store.
- Probably the same team that used to make the Snapchat Android app back in the day
  
  What makes it even more ridiculous is that it was originally a perfectly functional 3rd party app that they bought out. AlienBlue worked on ipads. A decade ago.
- I mean, look at the facebook app. They had to do "optimizations", because they ran into limits of Android's Dalvik a few years back.
  
  More than a few years back - they've long since replaced dalvik with ART.
  
  Or i confused dalvik with art. Don't know anymore. Facebook app got leaner?
  
  No, it's just been about 10 years since they had that issue. Facebook mitigated it by splitting its services into multiple apps.
  
  Huh, time flies.
  
  Tell me about it. Dalvik was replaced by the ART in Android 4.4 Kitkat IIRC, which is what my Nexus 7 shipped with back in 2013. Feels like 3 years ago rather than 10.

206 comments