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Comment by creshal | Hacker News Reader

But why?

There are a fair few devices out there still running old versions of Android¹ – particularly a number of ebook devices that are commonly rooted to do more/other than run the officially included software which may be inadequate², deprecated³, or simply dead⁴.

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[1] >3% of android running 6 or 5, according to several sources found in a quick search, of which https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/android seems to be the most up-to-date.

[2] Not supporting newer formats/features perhaps, or just being a very tightly walled garden of minimal features.

[3] So not supported at all any more.

[4] If they rely on external services that have since closed, for instance.

Yup. Notably, these devices are pre-Treble, so there's no prospect for any sort of GSI support (which would open up things like Droidian). So Termux is pretty much the best you can do if you care about providing a sensible environment in a device-independent way.

Initially Android 5/6 was dropped[0] since 2020-01-01, but this year it was decided to bring Android 5/6 support back for app & bootstrap.[1]

Additional context: read-only package repos (as archived on 2019-12-09) moved to official site.[2]

[0] https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues/4467

[1] https://github.com/termux/termux-app/pull/2740

[2] https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues/4658

Are you implying that it shouldn't have been done, or are you just curious about authors' motivation?

If the latter, I'd guess that some of them still want to support Android 5/6 phones. Some of them still exist and work fine.

And tablets

to be able to run stuff on the years old android phones

to have your own cloud running on your old cellphone, I use it to store backups, pictures, vpn,...

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