I'm fine with Firefox dropping niche platforms and focusing resources on actual users. (Most stats don't even cover the Amazon devices; the only mention I could find of Silk usage was 0.02% of traffic.) But it surprises me that Amazon's devices are now far enough off from regular Android that there's a support burden. Anybody here shipping apps for Fire who can explain?
In turn Amazon only partnered because there wasn't a YouTube app, and via Firefox they could support YouTube. But they reached a deal with YouTube (maybe using Firefox as leverage), so it didn't matter to them any longer.
Sorry, what? I think I need to know more...
The whole Meego project (Nokia + Intel, 2009 from the top of my head) was founded with the goal of getting Intel phones. When Nokia jumped ship in February 2011, Intel still continued and hired Nokia engineers to make phones. How long they tried, I have no idea.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/75203/i...
But I can copy statically linked binaries from my main Linux machine, and they work. (Dynamically linked typically don't because Android userspace is so different from "proper" Linux.)
I still have a HTC Desire with the last 2.3 based MIUI, and that OS is still wonderful.
Honestly it's just really annoying. I've toyed around with Lineage and such but at some point it seems it got a lot harder to do things on a lot of models and carrier configs. It seems you need to really research exactly what phone model is open enough and has enough people graciously doing open source work to support updates and such outside of the manufacturer and carrier.
Nope. And I even stopped updating Firefox, because their move to Quantum on Android made a great browser and abysmal experience.
Once this phone dies, I'll go and buy a Fairphone, hoping that might be kept alive a bit longer with updates.
Great? Perhaps not. But much better than the phones manufacturers just dump onto the market and then forget about.
It's a sad state of software development that we so quickly drop support for older hardware, it contributes massively to e-waste, although Android manufacturers shoulder a lot of the blame for not supporting OS upgrades.
Context: Put out a (hopefully) final release for API 16 last month. It'll mean that 15,000 people can no longer update the app. From analytics, we still have users on Android 1.5 (API 3)
Not sure if that's Google Play's metrics being played with, but it's shocking that there appear to be installs on something that old (it's well before TLS 1.2 support on Android, and most of the internet will be broken)