8 ms·

Ending support for Android Market on Android 2.1 and lower

57 points by AndrewDucker 9y ago

jtreminio 9y ago
Semi-related, I've got an iPad 1st gen, and wanted to gift it to my nieces in El Salvador for school work. So, I wiped it, hoping to give them a blank slate to install whatever they need. I wish I hadn't - I could find absolutely nothing to install on the device from the Apple Store. Everything requires new iOS version (which is fine, of course), but I also can't install old versions of software on the iPad. Basically, I screwed myself by wiping the device because now the default, pre-installed apps are the only apps that will ever run on this thing again.
- JadeNB 9y ago
  Can you restore from an old backup? (iTunes by default preserves at least the most recent backup when you sync; in fact, I don't know how to stop it from keeping at least one.)
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  This same sickness affects old iPhones too.
- eugeniub 9y ago
  Are you sure? IIRC when I played with my old iPhone 3Gs (older than iPad) earlier this year, I could still install the old versions of apps, even if the new ones required higher iOS versions. I kinda have to question the value of giving someone a 7 year old device with a $50 market value that can't run any modern apps. Why not just send her $50 to buy a new Android tablet that probably runs whatever she needs?
  - jtreminio 9y ago
    I tried most of Google's offerings, iPad refused to install them. > I kinda have to question the value of giving someone a 7 year old device The device is perfectly usable. The battery life is still great on it, the screen is unscratched, it runs school-related apps just fine (or, did). What am I supposed to do with the thing now? Just junk it? edit: I ended up giving them an Android tablet. I still have this iPad, and would love to at least give it to an organization that can hand it off to someone in need. Something inside me absolutely balks at the idea of throwing away a perfectly usable, modern device just because the parent company turns a blind eye to it.
    - Retric 9y ago
      It's 5 years old which is when a lot of corporate computers end up in the junk heap even if they are still running.
      - Cyph0n 9y ago
        Why are you comparing a personal tablet to a corporate computer? Consumer needs and expectations are vastly different from those of businesses.
      - megous 9y ago
        Not really, there's big refurbished computers market, where this stuff ends up.
    - gambiting 9y ago
      Well, you could just jailbreak it, find the compatible version of all apps that you need and sideload them. If you bought them previously, I don't see any moral issues with this.
  - dep_b 9y ago
    Once downloaded in your account you can still access them.
- dep_b 9y ago
  If you install an app on a newer device while using the same account sometimes the older download becomes available for the older device as well. This worked really well for an iPhone 4 stuck on iOS 8 or 7 somebody gave my stepdaughter.
- analogmemory 9y ago
  Can you jailbreak it?
  - duskwuff 9y ago
    Probably, but what does that gain you? It's still an old OS, and most software that a user would want is still going to be unavailable.
- sedachv 9y ago
  This kind of user-hostile and environmentally destructive and unsustainable planned obsolescence is exactly why you should use GPLv3 and the AGPL as your Free Software licenses. Apple and Google's current software offerings have been built on Free Software and what this is what we get in exchange.
  - orangecat 9y ago
    There are plenty of reasons to criticize Google's lack of long-term support, only 2 years of OS updates for the Nexus and Pixel lines is lousy. But this is perfectly reasonable. Android 2.2 was released 7 years ago. The Nexus One and original Motorola Droid can run it; any device that can't has been obsolete for years.
    - sedachv 9y ago
      I am typing this comment on a Thinkpad T43, a model that was released in 2005. It does not matter that you think 7 years ago is a long time. There is nothing "perfectly reasonable" about planned obsolescence. If a thing is still usable and someone wants to use it, preventing them from doing so is violating their freedom.
      - orangecat 9y ago
        I am typing this comment on a Thinkpad T43, a model that was released in 2005. Phones have advanced much more rapidly than computers in the last 10 years. If a thing is still usable and someone wants to use it, preventing them from doing so is violating their freedom. You are free to continue using your Android 2.1 devices, just not with Google's store. It is your position that no service provider should ever be allowed to drop support for any hardware that might still be functioning? Are you equally outraged at F-Droid's "planned obsolescence" in requiring 2.3? (https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=f-droid&fdid=org.fdroid.fdroid https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=f-droid&fdid...)
        sedachv 9y ago
- codinghorror 9y ago
  a 1st gen iPad .. I'd just buy and gift them a $329 iPad (2017) which is an INSANE deal for what you get, arguably the best value per dollar of any Apple device, ever.
  - jtreminio 9y ago
    I bought them a modern Android tablet ... and I'm still stuck holding an iPad that can't do much of anything.
    - morganvachon 9y ago
      I have the opposite problem: I have a 1st gen iPad that still has all the old apps we used on it, but it sat on a shelf for a year and now the battery won't charge. I've tried all the little tricks scattered across the 'net and nothing. I can get the screen to power up to the "Connect to iTunes" logo, but it won't charge in that mode and won't boot the OS off the charger alone. I'd love to get it running, as you said it's still a very capable device and if nothing else would be a good digital newspaper for the bedside. Unfortunately, I think it's toast and I'm going to have to send it to the recycler.
    - codinghorror 9y ago
      They still sell Android tablets? Who buys them? Also it's more than a little weird to expect a V1 product in its genre, from 2010, to still be useful 7 years later. I think your expectations are all messed up here.
      - fulafel 9y ago
        Hint: An iPad is an unaffordable luxury to most people.
        codinghorror 9y ago
        Not when it is being given as a gift
- thought_alarm 9y ago
  Since 2012 and iOS 6, the App Store will offer to install the most-recent compatible version of an app. You can buy the most-recent version of app on your computer using iTunes (or a newer iOS device), and then download the last compatible version to your iOS 6 device.
  - futurix 9y ago
    Original iPad only had iOS 5 - so no such luck. Same applies for pre-3GS iPhones and first 3 generations of iPod Touch.
- nevster 9y ago
  To anyone who has this problem, there's the option to download older versions but you have to be logged in to the appstore using an apple id that was used to download that version previously.
- ThatDan 9y ago
  There's a trick to downloading older versions of apps still in the App Store: https://medium.com/@iosight/how-to-legally-download-any-previous-version-of-an-app-store-app-through-itunes-9b45559b8357 https://medium.com/@iosight/how-to-legally-download-any-prev... I was able to get this working recently* to get an older version of Pandora installed on an original iPhone. Problem with this method is you're guessing at version numbers to find a version that will work, but it's neat when it does! *The article says certificate pinning breaks this, but there's a comment about how to add Charles Proxy's certificate to your trust store which seems to circumvent this.
JadeNB 9y ago
Yet another reason to be thrilled, as an Android user, that my ability to upgrade is held hostage to my phone vendor's willingness to package it. Google has so much weight to throw around, and seems to recognise the problem with fragmentation; why do they only ever take such half-hearted steps to combat it?
- juliand 9y ago
  They announced Project Treble back in Google IO to combat fragmentation. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes-treble-modular-base-for.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...
  - kentt 9y ago
    I want to believe, but I'm worried that it won't work any better than their past efforts to address fragmentation. eg Android Update Alliance (2011). I'm sure there were other failed promises, but I can't recall offhand. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/what-happened-to-the-android-update-alliance/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/what-happened-to-the...
    - euyyn 9y ago
      That alliance sounds like just the motivation/PR part. Treble is the "remove the actual technical hurdle that made it hard" part. That makes me more hopeful.
      - kentt 9y ago
        I'm more hopeful as well. I'm just wary that vendors may find a way to screw it up.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  Apple does the same thing. You won't find much in iTunes that will run on iOS 5 or lower.
JohnTHaller 9y ago
For context, Android Eclair 2.1 was released 7.5 years ago. Android Froyo 2.2, which succeeded it, was released 7 years ago and is still supported by the Google Play Store.
- synicalx 9y ago
  Not necessarily a good thing, encouraging people to use software that's been unpatched and out of date for at least 5 years.
  - PostOnce 9y ago
    The problem is that support for hardware ends far too soon. We're about to hit a transistor size wall; it doesn't make sense to spend $500 on a phone that is functionally equivalent to your old one just to get a software update. Why can you run a cutting edge commercial OS on a 12 year old PC but not a 2 year old phone? You wouldn't buy a $500 washing machine, microwave, or oven that only lasted 2 years, but you're expected to do so for a phone?
    - synicalx 9y ago
      I agree, Android is particularly bad for this as well. I work with someone still using an iPhone 4 - works fine for him in that he can make and receive calls on it which is all he uses it for, but thanks to shoddy update support I can still send specific characters to him in an SMS and make his phone restart!
    - zanny 9y ago
      > Why can you run a cutting edge commercial OS on a 12 year old PC but not a 2 year old phone? Because Windows isn't open source. That is absolutely the answer. Because hardware manufacturers couldn't just take Windows and recompile the kernel for their own custom hardware they had to support the IBMPC standard bios interfaces and ACPI. With Android, when hardware manufacturers can get away with not standardizing the hardware platform to be OS generic, they make custom shit blobs they stick in a Linux kernel and leave for dead after 2 years. Because it sells new devices. If you could keep an old S3 updated to the latest Android effortlessly there would be no artificial software based pressure to buy a new phone as long as you still liked the old one. I actually find it really fascinating that it seems that hardware vendors are aggressively trying to create new modes of planned obsolescence as Google ramps up efforts to reduce their ability to abandon updates. User irreplaceable batteries are the biggest one to me, where vendors take the extra step to be truly devious and make hard-to-access batteries in sealed phones actually impossible to replace because they either solder the battery in or make it break the connectors when you try to remove it.
MBCook 9y ago
I understand the OS is seven years old but only 10 days notice still seems kind of short.
barbs 9y ago
To be clear - this doesn't mean that you can no longer install apps on Android 2.1 and lower, just that you can't use Android Market/Google Play. It's pretty easy to sideload APKs, and the development tools still provide for Android 2.1 and lower. Of course, you lose the convenience and relative malware protection that Google Play offers, but if ease-of-use and/or security are primary concerns you shouldn't be using a 7.5 year-old operating system anyway. Also, they don't show versions lower than 2.3 on this graph, but I think it's fair to assume that the user share for 2.1 is far lower than 2.3's 0.8% https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html. In short, this isn't a big problem at all.
- cesarb 9y ago
  > Also, they don't show versions lower than 2.3 on this graph, but I think it's fair to assume that the user share for 2.1 is far lower than 2.3's 0.8% https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html. The graph legend says they don't show versions with user share lower than 0.1%, so one could infer that the user share for 2.1 is <0.1%, but they also say that this graph only shows "devices that visited the Google Play Store in the prior 7 days". Devices which haven't connected to Google's servers recently (for instance, because they don't have an Internet connection) aren't counted. And while the development tools still allow developers to target older releases, there were large API changes in Android 3 and 4 (these were the versions which added tablet support), so developers often will target only API level 14 (Android 4) and above.
- joshumax 9y ago
  Shoot, now my calculator won't get any more cool apps... https://youtu.be/Skbuc_pQj9g https://youtu.be/Skbuc_pQj9g
- walrus01 9y ago
  Two years ago, cheap $50 smartphones with 3.5" screens running on generic MediaTek chipsets sold in West Africa were based on Android 4.0 or 4.2 depending on the device. I wouldn't worry too much about the market share of devices older than 4.0 at this point.
duncan_bayne 9y ago
https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/ This (planned obsolescence) is what you get when you buy closed hardware running proprietary software.
tanilama 9y ago
Android 2.1 is probably not usable at this point anyway.
dirtylowprofile 9y ago
Please include Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean.
Brian_K_White 9y ago
Everyone keeps saying "7.5 years old" as though that is the only fact that matters. I happen to like my Nook Glowlight. I have a newer Kobo also, but, like all the new ereaders, it lacks hardware page-turn buttons, and microsd slot. In the case of that Nook, I did in fact root it and already had to side-load apps anyway, since it only runs android 1.6. So, don't bother telling me how to make my Nook work. It's not about me or my Nook. It's about this idiotic response that no one could possibly have any legitimate reason to run 7 year old software. You know what? I'd LOVE to run new software on my 7 year old DEVICE. But they don't bother to make current software compatible with old devices. It would be incredibly inconsiderate to demand it, but I'd even almost swallow "just get a new device", except they don't make new devices that have the same features as the old device. For instance that Nook. New nooks and all other ereaders lack the features I specifically valued about that one. There are countless examples of features that you want, that devices have only one time or for a short while, and then not again. Hardware buttons, sdcard slot, removable battery, headphone jack, (conversely, headphones with a cord that plugs into anything, how do you use airbuds with your roku remote? ), size that actually fits in your hand even if you're a small woman, special museum glass anti-reflective screen (vaio tz laptop), or literally countless other features that someone else decides you no longer need. Meaning there are countless examples of why someone might actually want to run "gasp 7 year old software omg I think I just threw up in my mouth..."

57 points by AndrewDucker 9y ago

Semi-related, I've got an iPad 1st gen, and wanted to gift it to my nieces in El Salvador for school work. So, I wiped it, hoping to give them a blank slate to install whatever they need. I wish I hadn't - I could find absolutely nothing to install on the device from the Apple Store. Everything requires new iOS version (which is fine, of course), but I also can't install old versions of software on the iPad. Basically, I screwed myself by wiping the device because now the default, pre-installed apps are the only apps that will ever run on this thing again.

JadeNB 9y ago
Can you restore from an old backup? (iTunes by default preserves at least the most recent backup when you sync; in fact, I don't know how to stop it from keeping at least one.)
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
This same sickness affects old iPhones too.
eugeniub 9y ago
Are you sure? IIRC when I played with my old iPhone 3Gs (older than iPad) earlier this year, I could still install the old versions of apps, even if the new ones required higher iOS versions. I kinda have to question the value of giving someone a 7 year old device with a $50 market value that can't run any modern apps. Why not just send her $50 to buy a new Android tablet that probably runs whatever she needs?
- jtreminio 9y ago
  I tried most of Google's offerings, iPad refused to install them. > I kinda have to question the value of giving someone a 7 year old device The device is perfectly usable. The battery life is still great on it, the screen is unscratched, it runs school-related apps just fine (or, did). What am I supposed to do with the thing now? Just junk it? edit: I ended up giving them an Android tablet. I still have this iPad, and would love to at least give it to an organization that can hand it off to someone in need. Something inside me absolutely balks at the idea of throwing away a perfectly usable, modern device just because the parent company turns a blind eye to it.
  - Retric 9y ago
    It's 5 years old which is when a lot of corporate computers end up in the junk heap even if they are still running.
    - Cyph0n 9y ago
      Why are you comparing a personal tablet to a corporate computer? Consumer needs and expectations are vastly different from those of businesses.
    - megous 9y ago
      Not really, there's big refurbished computers market, where this stuff ends up.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    Well, you could just jailbreak it, find the compatible version of all apps that you need and sideload them. If you bought them previously, I don't see any moral issues with this.
- dep_b 9y ago
  Once downloaded in your account you can still access them.
dep_b 9y ago
If you install an app on a newer device while using the same account sometimes the older download becomes available for the older device as well. This worked really well for an iPhone 4 stuck on iOS 8 or 7 somebody gave my stepdaughter.
analogmemory 9y ago
Can you jailbreak it?
- duskwuff 9y ago
  Probably, but what does that gain you? It's still an old OS, and most software that a user would want is still going to be unavailable.
sedachv 9y ago
This kind of user-hostile and environmentally destructive and unsustainable planned obsolescence is exactly why you should use GPLv3 and the AGPL as your Free Software licenses. Apple and Google's current software offerings have been built on Free Software and what this is what we get in exchange.
- orangecat 9y ago
  There are plenty of reasons to criticize Google's lack of long-term support, only 2 years of OS updates for the Nexus and Pixel lines is lousy. But this is perfectly reasonable. Android 2.2 was released 7 years ago. The Nexus One and original Motorola Droid can run it; any device that can't has been obsolete for years.
  - sedachv 9y ago
    I am typing this comment on a Thinkpad T43, a model that was released in 2005. It does not matter that you think 7 years ago is a long time. There is nothing "perfectly reasonable" about planned obsolescence. If a thing is still usable and someone wants to use it, preventing them from doing so is violating their freedom.
    - orangecat 9y ago
      I am typing this comment on a Thinkpad T43, a model that was released in 2005. Phones have advanced much more rapidly than computers in the last 10 years. If a thing is still usable and someone wants to use it, preventing them from doing so is violating their freedom. You are free to continue using your Android 2.1 devices, just not with Google's store. It is your position that no service provider should ever be allowed to drop support for any hardware that might still be functioning? Are you equally outraged at F-Droid's "planned obsolescence" in requiring 2.3? (https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=f-droid&fdid=org.fdroid.fdroid https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=f-droid&fdid...)
      - sedachv 9y ago
codinghorror 9y ago
a 1st gen iPad .. I'd just buy and gift them a $329 iPad (2017) which is an INSANE deal for what you get, arguably the best value per dollar of any Apple device, ever.
- jtreminio 9y ago
  I bought them a modern Android tablet ... and I'm still stuck holding an iPad that can't do much of anything.
  - morganvachon 9y ago
    I have the opposite problem: I have a 1st gen iPad that still has all the old apps we used on it, but it sat on a shelf for a year and now the battery won't charge. I've tried all the little tricks scattered across the 'net and nothing. I can get the screen to power up to the "Connect to iTunes" logo, but it won't charge in that mode and won't boot the OS off the charger alone. I'd love to get it running, as you said it's still a very capable device and if nothing else would be a good digital newspaper for the bedside. Unfortunately, I think it's toast and I'm going to have to send it to the recycler.
  - codinghorror 9y ago
    They still sell Android tablets? Who buys them? Also it's more than a little weird to expect a V1 product in its genre, from 2010, to still be useful 7 years later. I think your expectations are all messed up here.
    - fulafel 9y ago
      Hint: An iPad is an unaffordable luxury to most people.
      - codinghorror 9y ago
        Not when it is being given as a gift
thought_alarm 9y ago
Since 2012 and iOS 6, the App Store will offer to install the most-recent compatible version of an app. You can buy the most-recent version of app on your computer using iTunes (or a newer iOS device), and then download the last compatible version to your iOS 6 device.
- futurix 9y ago
  Original iPad only had iOS 5 - so no such luck. Same applies for pre-3GS iPhones and first 3 generations of iPod Touch.
nevster 9y ago
To anyone who has this problem, there's the option to download older versions but you have to be logged in to the appstore using an apple id that was used to download that version previously.
ThatDan 9y ago
There's a trick to downloading older versions of apps still in the App Store: https://medium.com/@iosight/how-to-legally-download-any-previous-version-of-an-app-store-app-through-itunes-9b45559b8357 https://medium.com/@iosight/how-to-legally-download-any-prev... I was able to get this working recently* to get an older version of Pandora installed on an original iPhone. Problem with this method is you're guessing at version numbers to find a version that will work, but it's neat when it does! *The article says certificate pinning breaks this, but there's a comment about how to add Charles Proxy's certificate to your trust store which seems to circumvent this.

JadeNB 9y ago

Yet another reason to be thrilled, as an Android user, that my ability to upgrade is held hostage to my phone vendor's willingness to package it. Google has so much weight to throw around, and seems to recognise the problem with fragmentation; why do they only ever take such half-hearted steps to combat it?

juliand 9y ago
They announced Project Treble back in Google IO to combat fragmentation. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes-treble-modular-base-for.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...
- kentt 9y ago
  I want to believe, but I'm worried that it won't work any better than their past efforts to address fragmentation. eg Android Update Alliance (2011). I'm sure there were other failed promises, but I can't recall offhand. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/what-happened-to-the-android-update-alliance/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/what-happened-to-the...
  - euyyn 9y ago
    That alliance sounds like just the motivation/PR part. Treble is the "remove the actual technical hurdle that made it hard" part. That makes me more hopeful.
    - kentt 9y ago
      I'm more hopeful as well. I'm just wary that vendors may find a way to screw it up.
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
Apple does the same thing. You won't find much in iTunes that will run on iOS 5 or lower.

JohnTHaller 9y ago

For context, Android Eclair 2.1 was released 7.5 years ago. Android Froyo 2.2, which succeeded it, was released 7 years ago and is still supported by the Google Play Store.

synicalx 9y ago
Not necessarily a good thing, encouraging people to use software that's been unpatched and out of date for at least 5 years.
- PostOnce 9y ago
  The problem is that support for hardware ends far too soon. We're about to hit a transistor size wall; it doesn't make sense to spend $500 on a phone that is functionally equivalent to your old one just to get a software update. Why can you run a cutting edge commercial OS on a 12 year old PC but not a 2 year old phone? You wouldn't buy a $500 washing machine, microwave, or oven that only lasted 2 years, but you're expected to do so for a phone?
  - synicalx 9y ago
    I agree, Android is particularly bad for this as well. I work with someone still using an iPhone 4 - works fine for him in that he can make and receive calls on it which is all he uses it for, but thanks to shoddy update support I can still send specific characters to him in an SMS and make his phone restart!
  - zanny 9y ago
    > Why can you run a cutting edge commercial OS on a 12 year old PC but not a 2 year old phone? Because Windows isn't open source. That is absolutely the answer. Because hardware manufacturers couldn't just take Windows and recompile the kernel for their own custom hardware they had to support the IBMPC standard bios interfaces and ACPI. With Android, when hardware manufacturers can get away with not standardizing the hardware platform to be OS generic, they make custom shit blobs they stick in a Linux kernel and leave for dead after 2 years. Because it sells new devices. If you could keep an old S3 updated to the latest Android effortlessly there would be no artificial software based pressure to buy a new phone as long as you still liked the old one. I actually find it really fascinating that it seems that hardware vendors are aggressively trying to create new modes of planned obsolescence as Google ramps up efforts to reduce their ability to abandon updates. User irreplaceable batteries are the biggest one to me, where vendors take the extra step to be truly devious and make hard-to-access batteries in sealed phones actually impossible to replace because they either solder the battery in or make it break the connectors when you try to remove it.

MBCook 9y ago

I understand the OS is seven years old but only 10 days notice still seems kind of short.

barbs 9y ago

To be clear - this doesn't mean that you can no longer install apps on Android 2.1 and lower, just that you can't use Android Market/Google Play. It's pretty easy to sideload APKs, and the development tools still provide for Android 2.1 and lower. Of course, you lose the convenience and relative malware protection that Google Play offers, but if ease-of-use and/or security are primary concerns you shouldn't be using a 7.5 year-old operating system anyway. Also, they don't show versions lower than 2.3 on this graph, but I think it's fair to assume that the user share for 2.1 is far lower than 2.3's 0.8% https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html. In short, this isn't a big problem at all.

cesarb 9y ago
> Also, they don't show versions lower than 2.3 on this graph, but I think it's fair to assume that the user share for 2.1 is far lower than 2.3's 0.8% https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html. The graph legend says they don't show versions with user share lower than 0.1%, so one could infer that the user share for 2.1 is <0.1%, but they also say that this graph only shows "devices that visited the Google Play Store in the prior 7 days". Devices which haven't connected to Google's servers recently (for instance, because they don't have an Internet connection) aren't counted. And while the development tools still allow developers to target older releases, there were large API changes in Android 3 and 4 (these were the versions which added tablet support), so developers often will target only API level 14 (Android 4) and above.
joshumax 9y ago
Shoot, now my calculator won't get any more cool apps... https://youtu.be/Skbuc_pQj9g https://youtu.be/Skbuc_pQj9g
walrus01 9y ago
Two years ago, cheap $50 smartphones with 3.5" screens running on generic MediaTek chipsets sold in West Africa were based on Android 4.0 or 4.2 depending on the device. I wouldn't worry too much about the market share of devices older than 4.0 at this point.

duncan_bayne 9y ago

https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/ This (planned obsolescence) is what you get when you buy closed hardware running proprietary software.

tanilama 9y ago

Android 2.1 is probably not usable at this point anyway.

dirtylowprofile 9y ago

Please include Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean.

Brian_K_White 9y ago

Everyone keeps saying "7.5 years old" as though that is the only fact that matters. I happen to like my Nook Glowlight. I have a newer Kobo also, but, like all the new ereaders, it lacks hardware page-turn buttons, and microsd slot. In the case of that Nook, I did in fact root it and already had to side-load apps anyway, since it only runs android 1.6. So, don't bother telling me how to make my Nook work. It's not about me or my Nook. It's about this idiotic response that no one could possibly have any legitimate reason to run 7 year old software. You know what? I'd LOVE to run new software on my 7 year old DEVICE. But they don't bother to make current software compatible with old devices. It would be incredibly inconsiderate to demand it, but I'd even almost swallow "just get a new device", except they don't make new devices that have the same features as the old device. For instance that Nook. New nooks and all other ereaders lack the features I specifically valued about that one. There are countless examples of features that you want, that devices have only one time or for a short while, and then not again. Hardware buttons, sdcard slot, removable battery, headphone jack, (conversely, headphones with a cord that plugs into anything, how do you use airbuds with your roku remote? ), size that actually fits in your hand even if you're a small woman, special museum glass anti-reflective screen (vaio tz laptop), or literally countless other features that someone else decides you no longer need. Meaning there are countless examples of why someone might actually want to run "gasp 7 year old software omg I think I just threw up in my mouth..."