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Comment by soylentcola | Hacker News Reader

Oddly enough, this is why I stopped buying iOS devices. With my old Android phones/the one Android tablet I got I was able to install something useful and pared-down once they became older and unsupported. They work fine as readers/browsers on my home network or as "fancy" remotes and local-network media players.

The only old iOS device I haven't sold/tossed is an iPad 2 which is unbearably slow for most things, and I can neither downgrade the OS or install some lighter alternative. Plus it needs a new 30-pin power cable but I haven't gotten around to buying one because all the other old devices just use one of a pile of USB cables I have stashed around.

As far as I'm concerned, at least in terms of repurposing older devices, iOS is like the old consoles where it's essentially stuck once there are no more "official" updates. If it boots Android, there's a decent chance I can install something custom on it years later.

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Yeah. I had a LG G Pad 8.3 (2013) that I used as much as last year until the screen separated from its body and started to fail as an effect. Was using it with LineageOS (don't remember the exactly version, but it was either Android 9 or 10), and it also allowed to tweak the scheduler so the CPU would always run at pretty much the maximum speed. The battery life was obviously bad but would still get one day of reading/watching videos (that was pretty much the main usage I had for it), and thanks for the tweaked scheduler the UI was not that laggy (it was laggy, but not worse than an actual low-end device).

Also, different from iOS at least Google still pushes updates for important parts of the system (Chrome, WebView, etc.), so at least for casual navigation it wasn't horrible insecure.

This is exactly what I did. I imported my GPad in 2013. It is still working as a pdf reader with its screen seperated.

I am planning to do some DIY fix and going to donate it. There are many kids here in India who needs a digital device to do their online classes but have to use a small screen phone

Hm, I have an OG iPad that runs a few excellent apps (TouchOSC, Animoog, Samplr) well enough that it‘s still a worthwhile device with just those. TouchOSC in particular should get massive props. As of last year, it was still able to update and is solid and super responsive. The App Store still works and I can download the last compatible version of any app I own.

Except for Safari, which is tied to OS updates. And of course Apple don't allow other browsers on the store so now you're stuck on the outdated browser.

I know my old iPad has issues with Home Assistant's web interface for example.

Apple allows other browsers in the App Store. I have Chrome on my iPad.

Or do you mean the underlying rendering engine?

Yeah safari barely works on it, which is maybe half because its outdated and half because websites have gotten a lot heavier since then. The iPad had a tiny amount of RAM by today‘s standards. Something like 512 MB, or even 255? iOS was aggressive about killing apps (esp safari) when RAM runs out. Not sure if it can even swap, or could back then?

This doesn't invalidate your argument (which I agree with) since it's unofficial and relies on exploits, but you should be able to downgrade your iPad 2 thanks to its unpatchable bootrom exploit and the fact that Apple apparently has to keep iOS 6.1.3 and 8.4.1 signed for that model specifically https://github.com/LukeZGD/iOS-OTA-Downgrader/wiki/How-to-Us...

I run iOS 8 on my iPad 2 (downgraded from iOS 9, which made it super slow). Unfortunately, Apple doesn't let you download old versions of apps unless you installed them at the time, so the device usage is restricted to "what I used the device for then", which hinders a lot.

All valid points. But I’ve made the mistake of trading in or losing all of my old Android phones which had unlocked bootloaders.

Also, installing a phone OS is more intimidating to me than, say, putting Debian on a laptop/desktop. I’m happy to go into a BIOS, play with voltages, overclock, etc. but please don’t ask me to hold some combination of buttons to start a process that can easily brick my phone.

As someone who has loaded custom roms on more than a couple of dozen Android devices over the years, it is really hard to brick a device installing an OS. The closest I came was an Xperia Play years ago, but even that was recoverable after pulling the battery.

These days there are some decently high guardrails for not bricking a device, as long as you follow installation instructions.

As long as that Android device has an unlocked bootloader, or an exploit to bypass the bootloader. The same thing can be said about iOS devices (other than perhaps a lack of 3rd party operating systems to install in the first place.)

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