Comment by burningChrome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by burningChrome | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>> Re-using devices helps us also reduce the number of new devices needed.

This isn't just the hardware makers, its also software makers.

A ton of the software gets sunset on older versions of Android. Older OnePlus phones, Sony and Google phones are being repurposed for Ubuntu Touch or Sailfish OS because many apps will only work on a specific Android version and up. Same thing with the Google Play store. If you have an older phone that works fine - that's great, too bad none of the software can run on it because modern apps are bloated, you need 12GB of RAM on your phone now. Oh sure you can technically run it, but it won't rune well.

I have three or four Windows phones that still run, but are completely worthless because the software can't be updated because the only browser that you could use was Explorer. Now that MS upgraded to Edge, these phones are worthless. Same thing with the Windows apps. I was able to use One Note on my Lumia 950 just as a stand alone note taker, but now it won't update because MS says it doesn't support that older version and I can't update it.

I agree 100% hardware makers are one of the reasons, but there's a massive issue with the software makers who do the same thing and essentially stop supporting older versions of their software that run fine on these older devices.

It feels like the whole software ecosystem: operating systems, 1st party app and 3rd party app developers, are all conspiring to keep us on the "buy, buy, buy" treadmill. I've got a perfectly good iPhone 7 and quite a few of the apps are no longer even on the app store, and my existing ones are starting to get "upgrades" that put up full-screen modal dialogs telling me the app no longer works on my phone. They can't even let me keep the old working app installed!

Not to even mention my old O.G. iPad 1 and iPhone 4 which both work as perfectly as the day I bought them, except that none of the software works and the app store is a total ghost town. Software developers are mostly to blame for obsoleting perfectly working hardware.

> Software developers are mostly to blame for obsoleting perfectly working hardware.

Is it the developer, say, of some app for Android or iOS, at fault, or is it that the changing API surface coupled with App Store policies means that an app developer is forced to keep releasing new versions and deprecating older operating systems and hardware? I always had the impression that Google and Apple took a very dim view of apps that were stable and not refreshed.

> Is it the developer, say, of some app for Android or iOS, at fault, or is it that the changing API surface coupled with App Store policies means that an app developer is forced to keep releasing new versions and deprecating older operating systems and hardware?

"Because of the release of GNOME 2.0 and 2.2, and the lack of interest in maintainership of GNOME 1.4, the gnome-core product is being closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME 2, please reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component. Thanks..."

"Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?

But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again."

It doesn't cost anything or hurt to keep older versions available to download--versions that work on the older OS/API levels.

>It doesn't cost anything or hurt to keep older versions

First, it affects my app ratings in the application store/shop. Some user with 15-year-old device gives me 1-star rating because of some annoying bug that was already fixed 10 years ago but he can not upgrade because that newer version is using a newer API.

Also, what about bugfixes and support? I do not want to have to support (answer emails/calls and deal with bad reviews on all platforms) my ancient version of an app. This would make my app unaffordable for 99% of my users.

> First, it affects my app ratings in the application store/shop

good example of systemic failure - we are destroying a real thing (functionality) to optimise for a fictional thing (rating). There is plenty of old windows software with no support, I have a game that is old enough to drink and it still works and I still sometimes fire it up out of nostalgia.

There is no reason software cannot be like an old motorbike - a 40 year old Honda motorbike can still work, if that’s what the user wants.

> we are destroying a real thing (functionality) to optimise for a fictional thing (rating)

Ratings are quite real. They influence if new people buy your app at all, which influences how viable it is as a business, which influences the app’s future, which influences current customers.

They are constructed reality as opposed to inherent reality. We invented a fake metric then created incentives (adjusting the allocation of real resources) to optimise the fake metric.

It’s not a “fake metric”. It exists, measures something, and it has an effect on the world. It is real. It’s a subpar metric¹, probably even a harmful metric², but that doesn’t make it fake or fictional.

¹ At best it only measures those who rate and it can be gamed (true for every media).

² For the bad incentives you mention.

Semantics/pedantry. I’m sure you’re capable of inferring what the OP means.

> I’m sure you’re capable of inferring what the OP means.

And it’s that I’m disagreeing with. I’m sure you’re capable of understanding that too. Words matter. By being against something and calling it fake or fictional, you’re doing more harm to your cause than by recognising the impact it has on the real world and those who inhabit it.

They're not a fake metric. Sure, ratings can be gamed and are gamed. But ratings and accompanying reviews inherently aren't fake, and are the closest proxy to "word of mouth"

They are artificial. You could have a separate metric for each platform, for older version, you can use different algorithms and to calculate, etc.

What you might be missing in your interpretation is that “fictional,” didn’t mean what you’re saying it does.

The OP meant that the app ratings aren’t a measure of a tangible quality or effect. Like “heat,” or “number of tickets.” The unit of measure and what it means is “fictional,” in the sense that the scale and units are completely made up and arbitrary.

They’re not saying that it’s fictional in the sense that it doesn’t exist or isn’t real.

They’re aptly noting that by forcing developers to optimize for this rating system, app stores are incentivizing developers to support only the most recent OS releases and deprecate support for older devices.

The ratings have real consequences.

Sorry, replying to the wrong comment.

That could easily be fixed by preventing people using old versions to give feedback. I guess no app store currently allows that right ?

Yeah this is an important perspective for coming up with a solution, because it’s a very legitimate reason to not want to support old hardware…

Until you bring the online services side into the picture.

A typical app depends on both OS APIs and remote service APIs.

Keeping the latter stable and supported is harder. Especially when there are third party services and frameworks involved, which there inevitably are.

And whereas no-longer-fixable bugs in an app might be work-aroundable, merely annoying, or outright irrelevant to some use cases, bugs in a service/framework can easily be security stuff that can take down your whole business or land you in regulatory hot water.

even the FOSS world (:

RHEL 9+ (and as a result, its decedents) is built for x86_64-v2 and has increased RAM requirements for certain installation procedures, so now hundreds/thousands of perfectly functional small servers are no longer able to upgrade (to the next EL version, obviously there are other distributions, but then there's the resource/energy requirement to change everything to something new...) (:

the entirety of computing from top to bottom doesn't give a fuck about the environment. The only way to make this "sustainable" is to slow down and fix/maintain things... but of course that's the antithesis of this world we've built.

One project that I keep coming back to again and again is keeping my circa 2011 netbook functional. It was my main computer for most of grad school, and it seems silly that a perfectly functional bit of hardware (for documents, spreadsheets, etc.) like that doesn't work well.

What I've found is mainstream distros seem to have no respect for aging hardware. Especially if they're desktop-focused. I have had some success with Trisquel[0], netBSD, and FreeDOS. I'm confident I could get Gentoo working if I'm picky about ebuild selection and build everything on a more modern computer, but that does sort of feel like it defeats the purpose. Another option would be maybe to install a version of a mainstream distro from 2011, with the caveat that I'd only be able to install software included on the installation media. Debian Squeeze repos are long gone.

I feel like I shouldn't have to stray so far from the beaten path to do something on a computer from 2011 that I could do comfortably on a Packard Bell in 1992.

[0] On recommendation from an FSF employee. Hardware that can run free software top-to-bottom tends to skew a little older, so Trisquel needs to run well on older hardware.

> The only way to make this "sustainable" is to slow down and fix/maintain things..

The other way is to design the machines, redesign, from the start so at the end they can be dismantled and their resources reused

I have experienced this exact same scenario. I recently started a new job and want to keep my work stuff completely separate and off my personal phone. I fired up my old iPhone 7 and can't even use the Google authenticator app for 2FA to get into my work accounts!

Apps are rarely self-contained you build on layers all the way down to the OS and BIOS/Firmware, I can fire up an old windows or DOS program only because Microsoft still support ancient API's or the BIOS API's still exist on the PC. The older phone processors are still perfectly fine but Apple and Google are not going to support them as they may be slow with new (bloated) code or may not have some fancy feature they use for one tiny part of their latest OS, same with the frameworks that build on top of them and with everything web these days there are a lot of layers.

It's so upsetting. I keep my Pixel 3 as a spare phone. It's perfectly fine, I just used it for 5 days while my primary was on it's own adventure. Perfectly fine, other than it being completely unsupported by Qualcomm and Google, and thus unusable as a daily-driver since banking apps, wallet, etc no longer work, as I've had to move to LineageOS for any sort of updates.

FWIW, rooted LineageOS works pretty well for banking apps, Netflix, etc. It's what I'm using for my daily driver. It takes it takes some fooling around with magisk, zygisk deny, props config, and universal safety net fix; but after you get things initially set up, you just have to re-do magisk after every update and the rest of the settings get restored.

The worst part is how the LineageOS folks and don't want to have anything to do with rooted devices. They seem to think that LOS is actually usable without rooting, but it just isn't in my experience.

> They seem to think that LOS is actually usable without rooting,

Depends on what software you want to run on your device, I guess. I build LineageOS from source, so I'm perfectly capable of rooting my device, but I don't bother.

I don't use Google Play Services, Google Play, or any apps from Google's store at all. Banking apps are not only unnecessary on my phone, but also unwelcome, mainly because they all demand overreaching permissions. I do my banking in a web browser, on a computer. This way, I have more control over what the banking client can do with the device it runs on, and no worries about what might happen to my accounts if my phone is lost or stolen.

With no need to trick software like that into running on my de-googled OS, I haven't had any need to root it.

Ok, that's fair. But you have to admit that there are some limitations imposed on what you can do with your phone.

For example: my bank doesn't accept check deposits via the website, but they do via the app. But the app only works if you're on an "approved" operating system, or if you root the device to tell the app it is. If I didn't use the app, I'd have to go to a bank branch in person, which means a car trip for me.

Similarly, netflix movies and games are only usable on LOS after rooting it. I don't do all that much of either of these, but it's nice to have if I end up stuck in a lobby somewhere for an hour. Odds are good that I won't have a laptop with me.

My credit union supported check deposits via web browser for years, but sadly, they discontinued that feature. I suppose I could switch to a credit union that still supports it, but it turns out my current one also accepts check deposits through the mail (I had to call them to learn this) so I do that instead. I'll keep the feature in mind next time I have reason to switch credit unions.

Netflix and commercial games just aren't priorities for me. I keep e-books on my phone for lobby reading, and F-Droid games can fill more hours than I think I'll ever have to spend.

FWIW, LendingClub, Schwab, Ameriprise, Fidelity have not requested invasive permissions from me. In the least.

However, I spent too much of my 20s futzing with ROMs. I don't doubt that there is a sequence of things to get SafetyNet on Lineage, but it's a losing game. And I refuse to play games like this nowadays, where "my life/time" are the cost I pay. And my lifestyle demands that I have at least backup access on my mobile.

Similarly, my A51 is only like 3-4 years old and it's already being slowly reduced to a useless brick because it only supports 4G which is being phased out and I keep losing connection entirely in some areas. The 85% charging limit has prevented the battery from degrading much over the years so it's still good for more than a day of use even after all this time. It literally works as good as the day I bought it and I'll have to get rid of it soon.

There should be more of a push for backwards compatibility at this sort of protocol level, if we stop supporting 2.4Ghz wifi a metric shit ton of devices will just become junk overnight even if they still work perfectly.

> The 85% charging limit has prevented the battery from degrading much over the years

Sorry, what is that? Is this something everyone knows, or some secret lore. I keep meaning to look up the basics of batteries and prolonging their life, and still haven't got their, so this comment triggers me (in a good way).

I think it's called "protect battery" or something like that in recent versions of Android, it just caps the max voltage your phone will charge to if left connected.

The basic deal is this: lithium cells like being at sort of half charge (typically 3.85V) where they don't degrade and this is called storage charge as a result. It's what any battery that's in a box or on a shelf will be at.

Going above 90% and under 15% (voltages depend on the exact chemistry) will do damage especially if left that way more than a few hours. So if you say, leave your phone on your bedstand to charge overnight, it'll do fast charging (which also does damage btw) and get itself to absolute max in like half an hour and then sit there for another 7-8 hours degrading until you unplug it. That's what this mainly prevents in practical day to day use.

So yeah, for best battery longevity charge with up to 1C (e.g. for a 3Ah battery, that's 3A max), charge in large chunks and try to keep it between 25-85% for the most part. Then you're basically guaranteed to get the max number of cycles out of it.

There's also another great feature called "power saving" which reduces power draw significantly (at least on my phone)by reducing background spying and capping CPU speed so it can last for 3-4 days if I don't use it much, which again saves a lot of charge cycles.

Awh that's legendary, thank you so much! Will be looking into all this. Great stuff

The problem with software support is that it costs a lot to keep old versions around, and even to keep drivers for old hardware around. Even if there weren't perverse incentives to brick old phones to sell new hardware, it's very hard to imagine that any company would keep old software working for free like this. Windows, which did aim to keep back compact and support relatively old devices in its day was quite expensive for its time, and upgrades were not free either.

Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft effectively have infinite money. It’s not a cost issue for them.

And if it’s a nuisance for them, they could release the specs and source code. The source code is effectively worthless to them. Why bother withholding it when it could be used to maintain old devices?

They also have very large software footprints, and enough bugs in their latest/supported versions that it is difficult to justify taking resources from latest to support to older versions with dwindling user base.

I know the software upgrade cycle is frustrating but if you’ve ever tried to both release new features and maintain legacy versions of software you know how complex that quickly becomes.

It is not simply a matter of releasing legacy source code. Modern software is extraordinarily complex and interwoven. Modern software doesn’t just run in one place, it exists across a multitude of systems and services, each with their own contracts and interfaces that evolved over time. There is a reason these companies have tens of thousands of engineers maintaining their code bases. Not to mention there are very real concerns about proprietary information, as many components of legacy systems are present in derived forms in their successors.

I’m all about right repair - especially for hardware - but it’s a bit naive to think that we’ll find nirvana in opening up legacy source code. I know it’s a tinkerer’s dream to dive through old versions of software you used to run and add your own little personal features, but realistically it would do nothing to move the needle much on actual public use of legacy software. Don’t forget the average user often cannot even troubleshoot why their printer is not working, let alone install, run, and troubleshoot a custom android stack on their 2006 Nokia.

I've been a professional software developer for over twenty years and writing software since I was a kid in the late 80s. I understand why it's hard supporting old platforms.

The source code is worthless. It's just one way a company could extend support for older platforms they've given up on supporting. It's not valuable for them to hold on to the sources.

We could all huddle around the existing Unices and BSDs and try to keep the forks going for older platforms. That's fine too.

But the original sources may have hints about how to support some of the custom hardware for a given platform that would be useful, etc.

It really wouldn't be hard for them to just say, "Okay, here's the source for the last build 12.x.x known to run on hardware revision 1.x.x," and leave it at that. Doesn't cost anyone anything.

Update: What's trickier perhaps is supporting older platforms through emulation and only having binaries. Just open the source, Luke.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com