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lemmyworld·Lemmy.World AnnouncementsbyRuud

Jerboa app and Lemmy 0.18

The 0.18 version of Lemmy was announced. This will solve many issues.

But we can't upgrade yet because the captcha was removed, and captcha relied on Websockets, which are removed in 0.18 so despite the devs agreeing on my request to add captcha back, this will not be until 0.18.1. Without captcha we will be overrun by bots.

Hopefully this 0.18.1 will be released soon, because another issue is that the newest version of the Jerboa app won't work with servers older than 0.18. So if you're on Lemmy.world, please (temporarily) use another app or the web version.

View original on lemmy.world
lemmy.world

The Dev's stubbornness about captchas is a little baffling. Yes, they're not 100% foolproof but they help.

It's like arguing that we shouldn't have locks on or our doors because a skilled lock picker can get past them.

149
lemmy.ml

The devs aren't pushing back against captchas, but they're desperately trying to get 0.18 out to resolve a ton of issues. Captchas need to be redone in the code level and no one has done it yet.

63

That looks promising, hopefully we’ll have an 0.18.1 release later next week

16
Kabereply
lemmy.world

That only happened recently, though. For weeks they were replying to instance admins requests to reinstate captchas with things like "bots have beaten captchas, so they're useless."

14
Kabereply
lemmy.world

My mistake, I understood admins had been asking for the return of captchas as soon as they were removed.

Still, it took a few days for the devs to agree to reinstate them, which, combined with the general tone seem in that second link, is what gave me the impression that they were reluctant to do so.

-25

In open-source projects and communities, it's often a bad idea to go around looking for (or inventing) conflicts among contributors. It can come across as drama-seeking or trolling.

In software engineering in general, a common reason that a desirable feature has not been written yet is that the people who know & work on the code only have so many hands, and so many hours in the day, and there are other things that also need doing.

This service is undergoing rapid development. Spam & abuse problems are things that folks who have run Internet services before are well aware of. It's not like anyone is going to give up and let spam bots ruin the thing they're building.

I doubt anyone wants to build a service that becomes 95+% spam & abuse, ya know?

21
sh.itjust.works

My very first post on Lemmy was a (admittedly out-of-date) rant about the devs stubbornness about the hardcoded bad words filter and their behavior in the relevant GitHub issues. And I had people jumping in the comments defending them, telling me that it was fixed years ago, they're better now, surely that couldn't possibly happen again.

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

ETA: and yeah, I know about kbin, I've tried both, kinda waiting to see all the new Android native apps before completely moving over there. Seeing how all this shakes out.

9
lemmy.world

Ok so guys, I appreciate the devs of Jerboa for doing what they do, but I am absolutely switching to another app immediately when something else decent shows up.

61
br3dreply
lemmy.fmhy.ml

I'm trying them all. As of today, Connect for Lemmy seems to be working the best

22
AnonLordoreply
lemmy.world

Connect is great, but take a look at Liftoff. It's even better. I think we'll see better apps than reddit ever had soon.

Edit: Releases since it' not on F-Droid or Playstore yet.

Edit: fixed link to releases.

17
RiotRickreply
lemmy.world

Liftoff has no way to change font size yet. I find the text too small for easy reading. Trying all the apps at moment. Jerboa is fine, but currently cannot login until lemmy.world is updated. Connect seems to work ok. Basically they are all still a work in progress, but usable.

4
florgereply
lemmy.world

Btw you're releases link goes to the 0.9.6 release which is still lemmynade

4

Been using it for a while now. Feels great for being a WIP app but there are still some hiccups (can't suscribe to communities that aren't on the same instance as my account as an example). Prob will use both Jerboa and Liftoff

3

Really liking the look of summit, but it's lacking a lot of features still.

4
lemmy.world

How does it compare to wefwef.app ? I’ve been using it a couple of days and it’s been pretty sweet so far. Found it on r/apolloapp.

6

I just checked this out. Until a better native app is created, I feel like this is by far the best choice for using the site on mobile. Good find 👍

4

wefwef.app

This looks really nice, but doesn't look like it has any mod tools.

1

Thunder on Android is the best of all the ones I've tried, Adaptive Icon and Material You support so feels very modern. It's a newer app but has a nice clean layout and development is happening fast.

4
kratoz29reply
lemmy.world

I'm and it works with lemmy.world, I still get the disclamer about Lemmy version, but still work regardless, what is it happening here?

13

The new version from GitHub will give a warning, but mostly works with an outdated Lemmy version. That's how I'm typing this very comment.

It does have a few actions that result in an immediate crash on outdated servers, but posting, commenting, following communities and reading notifications work.

Oh, and you must be logged in already. New logins do not work.

9
Dandroidreply
lemmy.world

I am. It gives me the warning and crashes a lot, but it works a little.

7
lemmy.ml

Successfully using the latest Jerboa and posting here from a different instance :)

4

Probably because you're already logged in from the previous version? On a clean install it won't be able to login, it will literally tell you that the instance needs to be at 0.18.0.

11

Ahh. That's really not good. In a time where we are expanding we have broken captcha resorting in instances protecting themselves from bots breaking the best Android app. Wonderful.

6
Pandareply
lemmy.world

Is the version on GitHub more recent than the one in the Play Store? The changelog in the Play Store said the update would make Jerboa ready for 0.18 and that's the version I have installed.

2

It was old (33) last evening when I checked. This morning it's up-to-date, but I'm obviously not applying it.

1
lemmy.world

Biggest concern for me is the broken auto scrolling/updating. I can't use this site properly as long as the list of topics doesn't stay in place long enough for me to finish reading the headline.

Hopefully after this is fixed I'll start contributing.

37
Anemervireply
lemmy.world

Try changing the 1 at the end of the url to 0 as a workaround.

14

I can't see how keeping we sockets open for everyone on the site is scalable- if it were me I'd want to be aggressively caching everything possible

4
lemmy.world

I know these are early-adopter pain points, but I think if Lemmy is really gonna take off, the devs need to get serious about backward compatibility and ensuring backend upgrades don't completely break major instances/clients. IMO switching from websocket to HTTP should have been treated as a breaking change with a new major version release and a more controlled rollout period for this exact reason.

32
barsoapreply
lemm.ee

Quoth semver 2.0.0:

Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.

"Semver proper" only starts at version 1.0.0:

Version 1.0.0 defines the public API. The way in which the version number is incremented after this release is dependent on this public API and how it changes.

22

This is important. Many people (and news outlets for that matter) consider Lemmy a product, when it really is very much an on-going early stage development effort.

It's amazing how well everything works already, but nothing should be considered stable at this point.

20
lemmy.world

Jerboa asks for 0.18 to be installed, but works with 0.17.4 mostly without issues.

29
lemmy.world

If you already Jerboa installed and set up and working then upgraded it in place, it seems to continue working fine with the 'outdated' version of lemmy.

That fact indicates that Jerboa is needlessly and overly sensitive with its startup checks when installing fresh and attempting to connect to a lemmy instance. I consider this a flaw with Jerboa.

Unfortunately, on my phone, the previous version of Jerboa always just crashed instantly on startup. That bug was fixed in the newest version of Jerboa, but I was never able to get Jerboa running enough previously to set it with a user account and preferred Lemmy instance.

25
phxreply
lemmy.world

Yeah, mine complained about the server version but from what I can see everything still works ok.

23
lemmy.world

For now i made a shortcut on my phone's home screen to this lemmy instance to act as a quasi lemmy client, works pretty well for the time being.

25
Restaldtreply
lemmy.world

Lemmy is a progressive web app and can be installed directly

Heres a link to the instructions to install pwas from google Install pwa

... so i read the instructions and its not too helpful. Open lemmy in chrome on android then hit the 3 dots in the top right and near/above the option to open the desktop site you should see an install lemmy button

10

I have a similar option in Firefox that I'm currently using. Thanks for telling there's other options, though.

3

Ouch. I understand exactly how things like that happen, but it is unfortunate. Hope it's resolved quickly.

There is a tremendous amount of pressure on everyone in the development/admin chain right now because of the insane influx of new users. (I'm one of them.) It amazes me how well everyone has been handling it. And I am grateful to all of you!

24
lemmy.world

I just updated and it gave me an error on jerboa but it still seems to be working fine

23
ribwichreply
lemmy.world

As a new user it won't let me login to this server

4

@[email protected] Dodged bullet anyway, v18 2FA doesn't make people confirm that their app is configured correctly by asking for a code, as is tradition. It just gives them their QR/Key and locks them into 2FA immediately. If they botch adding it to their app they are locked out. And I hear the code currently being generated is silently incompatible with Authy, so those people end up SOL even if they do everything right.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3309 / https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3325

20
wit
lemmy.world

Damn, that sucks. Is manual approving + email not enough for the time being?

EDIT: I see that in the GitHub issue you linked, you answer this question. TLDR: No, it is not enough it seems.

18
lemmy.ml

They were removed because they don't work with the new system, not because someone felt like removing it. If someone volunteers to add them back, they'll be back

11
minimarreply
lemmy.world

Because it addresses a number of critical bugs. Why is nobody in this thread reading the update announcement? They explain themselves well there.

@[email protected] maybe link to it in this post as it'd probably clear up a lot of confusion.

11
Ruudreply
lemmy.world

The first link in my post is to the release blog.

7

I understand. It would only be until captchas are back in the release (i.e. 0.18.1). I only suggested this because 0.18 fixed some nasty annoyances.

7
lemmy.world

Alternatively to Jerboa, it's possible to use the web site as a contained web-app, using Firefox on Android.

17

Thanks for showing me this. It worked on chrome too.

12
phxreply
lemmy.world

Q: When you do that, does it somehow segregate the session/cookies from the rest of your browsing with the browser

5

there's a couple of points here

  1. current website is version 0.17.4 (you can check this at the very bottom)
  2. version 0.18 is ready, but there's no captcha yet (the thing where you have to identify objects on squares, or click a box that'll turn into checkmark)
  3. without captcha, bot accounts (not real users) can register to the site too easily
  4. so we're gonna wait for version 0.18.1, the one with captcha active.
  5. the Jerboa app, the android app for browsing Lemmy has also recently updated, and will only work for Lemmy version 0.18 up, thus it's advised to use another app or just the web for now

note : the site version 0.18 is already out for the main Lemmy instance, which is lemmy.ml, but lemmy.world (where we are now) is gonna wait for version 0.18.1

42
Kwaker76reply
lemmy.world

I'm using Jerboa and everything seems to be working fine. Edit: Jerboa started playing up mainly crashing on opening it. Binned it off and now using Connect

11
vvvvanreply
lemmy.world

I first thought my Jerboa was fine (despite the popup warning about version), since I could browse a bit without it obviously exploding. But no, it crashes regularly now (closes, no warning or messages).

I don't understand why a Lemmy update would be considered for release that removes security features like captcha support. (Especially during this time of high rates of signups, and well known bot wave in some instances.)

Combined with Jerboa update that needs the Lemmy update, and popularity of instances that need captcha, it's unfortunately causing a mess for many users.

Edit: After a few more hours of use, I must say it's worse than I thought. Jerboa crashes every time within a few minutes, while simply scrolling or voting. Hopefully Lemmy gets captcha re-implemented very soon, and lessons are learned.

19

yeah i agree. This setup is really dumb. I just joined and this took way too much fiddling already for new 'simple' reddit users. Helps i'm used to linux.

3
ssorbomreply
lemmy.world

I'm currently using the app called lemmy connect without issues.

4

Yeah it's not bad, I prefer jerboa (really I'm waiting for sync) but connect works fine

5

Lemmy.world is running Lemmy version 0.17.4 right now (check the bottom of any Lemmy instance and it'll tell you what version is running). The new version fixes a lot of things, but lemmy.world can't upgrade to that new version yet because it'll be overrun by bot accounts. We have to wait for the next version and skip this update because that has the protections for bot accounts.

15
lemmy.world

So that's why Jerboa crashes as soon as I log in.

Moved to Connect, happy with that.

15
ikiddreply
lemmy.world

I wonder if it's a problem with lemmy.ml as your login host.

2

Potentially. I'm not sure. I'm pretty new to lemmy. Is it common for people to make accounts in more than one instance?

1
martyc3reply
lemmy.world

Same issue. I switched to Connect for Lemmy which seems fine so far.

7
twistedtxbreply
lemmy.world

It won't work if you're registered on lemmy.world, no matter which version of Jerboa you install

4
twistedtxbreply
lemmy.world

It's a catch 22.

If you're registered on lemmy.world, you need Jerboa 34 or earlier. But since Jerboa first checks on lemmy.ml (which requires v18 support) it automatically crashes.

I can still use Jerboa 35 but I can't login on my instance until 18.1 gets released.

4

I downloaded v0.0.5 from github and logged in with that, and then upgraded to 35. It seems to work now.

1

Maybe it's because you're already logged in. Don't log out until the next version!

7

I'm confused too. I dl'd Jerboa from the play store three days ago and it seems to be working fine but I'm a noob maybe I don't know what broken looks like

1
lemmy.world

And to anyone using Jerboa, be sure not to update past v0.0.34 until you see server v0.18.1+ on lemmy.world.

12
idunnololzreply
lemmy.world

Dev of Summit here. Summit v0.1.17 was released recently and this version is backwards compatible and should support both 0.18 and older servers if anyone wants to give it a go for the time being. It is still missing a lot of feature though.

12

I just deleted and installed v0.0.34 from F-droid to log in

Once Lemmy.world updates, I will update as well

3
lemmy.world

Jerboa just quit when I tried using it on Android - Pixel 5 w/Android 12. Wouldn't open at all, so I quit on it. Trying out Summit now

12
lemmy.world

Also have that problem. V0.0.34 crashes, and V0.0.35 doesn't work with Lemmy.world, so I had to switch to Liftoff

2
lemmy.world

Should've read this first. I was getting that instance outdated popup on jerboa app, thought a logout and re-login would resolve it. Now I can't login, my mistake..

11
lemmy.world

Thanks. I installed Jerboa yesterday and it was not working. Glad to know this may be the cause. I can wait for 0.18.1 for mobile access

10
Sterbenreply
lemmy.world

That version crash on launch for me. Anyway to fix it?

EDIT: I fix it doing like this:

  1. Run the app in offline mode (airplane mode).
  2. Than go to login, and try sign in with your account.
  3. Turn on internet again.
  4. Once logged in, I updated the apps, and I am still logged in.

That's strange, it is like you can be logged in, but the devs just opted to not allow you to.

1
lemmy.world

If you are logged in you can just update Jerboa to v0.0.35 and you'll get a message saying that the app works better with Lemmy v0.18 but it still works.

If you are not logged in, then use Jerboa v0.0.34 to log in and then update to v0.0.35

9

Fun fact, the reason why login is incompatible between 0.17 and 0.18 is in 0.18, the value of the user's default sort order and "listing order" (eg. all, local or subscribed) was changed from an numeric value to a string (text) value.

10

After installing Jerboa from the Play Store I encountered the crashing issue everyone is mentioning. I was able to seemingly fix the issue by going into the App Info -> Storage and hit Clear Storage. After it cleared it's been working fine for me. Hopefully this works for you folks unless I'm missing something about the issue.

9
lemmy.world

How about temporarily disabling sign ups until 0.18.1? As more apps update to 0.18 it'll be annoying to juggle versions.

8
Empyreusreply
lemmy.world

Anything stopping new members from signing up is going to hurt the adoption of the platform as a whole.

30
andylireply
lemmy.world

There are still many other instances that accept signups, so I don't think temporally disabling lemmy.world signup will hurt lemmy.

However, having a popular client incompatible with a popular instance will annoy existing and new users.

5

This is a classic damned if you do damned if you don't. Right now engagement of the users that are already here and adoption of new users is of equal importance.

2

The release candidates for 0.18 were published at an almost daily basis. I think it's fair to assume .1 won't take forever.

14
lemmy.world

Omg I was just getting on track developing my own Lemmy app based on websockets and now they are being removed... welp

7
woelkchenreply
lemmy.world

While I understand your frustration, the change was announced beforehand.

16
kbin.social

I tried that app over a week ago (F-Droid) and it just crashed 5 times just me trying to read the refugee welcome message.
Now that my beehaw account got approved a few days ago, I thought I give it a try again to use it with the app (Play Store), but now it crashes as soon as I start it while it loads its changelog message.
Hopefully one of the other 9 clients is going to have something more stable to offer than this.

6

I'm seeing this same thing: crash on startup. I'm "using" the latest from the Play Store.

Edit: installing the latest release from GitHub is working

2
solrizereply
lemmy.world

No need for a database table, just encrypt the solution and encode it in the filename.

3
brianorcareply
lemmy.world

You don't want to provide any more info to the client that you need to. Otherwise someone can write a robot that decrypts that filename and breaks the captcha.

1

Encrypted means encrypted with real cryptography, using a secret key known only to the server. If a random robot can break that, we are all in trouble. Almost all internet security depends on basically similar cryptography.

3

Beehaw don't support Lemmy.World and other instances that dare to allow anyone to set up an account. They are anti-fediverse.

2
lemmy.world

Jerboa also won't work with Android older than 8.0 though that's less of a problem for server ops. But it still seems like reliance on unnecessary shiny tech. My 5yo Android 7 phone still works perfectly well and I plan to keep using it a while longer, so I can't use the official Lemmy app. I wonder how fundamental Jerboa's dependence on Android 8 is. Anyone know?

4
Alawamireply
lemmy.ml

The real crime here is that a 5yo android phone is running 7 which was released 8 years ago?

25

It was released in August 2016 so that makes it almost 7 years, but your point still stands.

3

It actually came with Android 6, and the vendor shipped one upgrade, to Android 7. Hmm, it looks like the phone (Moto XT1625) was announced in 2016, so 7 years ago.

0
woelkchenreply
lemmy.world

seems like reliance on unnecessary shiny tech. My 5yo Android 7 phone still works perfectly well

I don't think it's the responsibility of unpaid app developers to work around that, especially when you can probably install a somewhat recent custom ROM. I have an ancient Nexus 4 with LineageOS 18.1 (Android 11, the last version for 32bit CPUs) and that version of LineageOS is still getting updates every few months.

11
Imaginosreply
lemmy.world

LineageOS doesn't pass google's SafetyNet, so it locks you out of a lot of banking apps, and also some other important apps.

It's possible to run those by rooting the phone and doing some hackery to trick the app into bypassing the SafetyNet check, but that's a race against google security features.

Besides, I gave up running LOS on my old phone and just bought a new phone with stock android 13, and Jerboa crashes on startup on it as well.

5

LineageOS doesn’t pass google’s SafetyNet, so it locks you out of a lot of banking apps, and also some other important apps.

There are Magisk modules that help with those problems. Yes, it's additional work but using ancient, unsupported, and insecure Android versions is definitively not the proper solution.

2
woelkchenreply
lemmy.world

That’s impressive

Yes but it's also not that uncommon for Google phones to get many years of updates thanks to community ROMs. Google actually supports old Android versions for a pretty long time, it's just that suites at Google don't want them to formally ship on their own phones and that's how LineageOS and even smaller community ROMs get support those phones with "relatively little" effort (at least compared to phones by random Android OEMs).

6
V4ubanreply
lemmy.world

That's good to hear. I would be curious to get a Pixel 4a, put LineageOS on it and see how long it would last

3
woelkchenreply
lemmy.world

FYI: You can't just install LinreageOS on top. It'll require a full wipe. Should you do cloud backups anyway, the step is not that bad. If you never dabbled with that, it's a bit intimidating at first but actually it's not that hard once you grasped the basics.

3

I have a 4a right now, plan to replace the battery sometime and switch to a community ROM when Google's formal support ends

2
solrizereply
lemmy.world

Asking users to install custom roms to browse Lemmy doesn't seem sound a good strategy for Lemmy to beat Reddit. What I'm wondering is whether Android 8 development is somehow easier than Android 7 development. I have not looked at the source code of RedReader. Someone mentioned the existence of Reddit API emulation for Lemmy. Maybe the easiest thing is run that, and point a copy of RedReader at it.

Lineage does sound nice, but it doesn't support my phone.

1
woelkchenreply
lemmy.world

Asking users to install custom roms to browse Lemmy doesn’t seem sound a good strategy for Lemmy to beat Reddit.

I don't ask anything of you. You're the one asking volunteer app developers to support your insecure ancient Android version. Installing a new version of Android is a good idea in any case but if you want to continue "resisting" just deal with apps becoming incompatible with time.

6

My phone came with Android 6, the vendor shipped an upgrade to Android 7, and I installed that. They didn't release any more upgrades. The phone hardware itself is still perfectly good so I really don't want to take part in a hardware upgrade treadmill just because the vendors like to play Wintel. I'm typing this on a laptop from 2011 (Thinkpad X220) that also still hasn't fallen apart, running Debian 11. It won't run the latest Windows but I don't care.

I still haven't heard any type of explanation what of what stops Jerboa from working with older Androids. If it would take a total rewrite then I can understand the devs not wanting to do that. If it means changing a #define then I'd say change the #define. As a general matter I find Lemmy's web design to be bloatier and more annoying than old.reddit so I'm not sure I would like Jerboa anyway (I haven't seen it). New Reddit is of course too horrible to think about.

I appreciate the work that the devs and ops have put into Lemmy but I frankly preferred the keyboard based UI's of 40 year old Usenet readers to these Javascript pages that squirm all over the screen. So I want to keep persuing text based viewers like RedReader and Gnus. I'd try Jerboa if it was convenient for me to do so, but I'm not going to buy a new phone to run a program that I have doubts about to begin with.

1
solrizereply
lemmy.world

I've gotten to the point that I think that any new software release of something like Android or Firefox is likely to make it worse than before. Reddit was another example. So I resist. What feature could they possibly want from Android 8 that wasn't in earlier versions? If it was the dev kit (Jetpack) then I can sort of understand, but Android 7 has plenty of user level features, and apps such as RedReader that work fine. I'd be delighted with a RedReader port for Lemmy.

The idea of buying another phone and making more e-waste just to deal with version churn is distasteful to me. I might get interested if I can find a phone that supports Lineage really well, but otherwise I'd rather keep using what I have until it falls apart (it is getting there).

Thanks though.

4
woelkchenreply
lemmy.world

So I resist. What feature could they possibly want from Android 8 that wasn’t in earlier versions?

I guess it's time for you to get into app development and find out firsthand.

I might get interested if I can find a phone that supports Lineage really well

Literally every single Google phone. Get a second hand last gen one if you're actually about reducing e-waste and that's not just an excuse.

5

If you mean the new Android 8 features only matter to developers, I guess I can sympathize with the Jerboa devs choosing to use them if it really made the dev work easier. From a user perspective though, Android 7 does everything I need, and RedReader shows that a Reddit viewer app can work fine in Android 7. I can't think of anything a Lemmy app needs to do that a Reddit app doesn't, though maybe I'm missing something.

I don't particularly want to become an Android app developer. That's sort of like becoming a Windows developer. I use Android basically due to lack of alternatives. 3g networks around here are now all shut down, so my Maemo phones are useless as phones, even if they weren't intolerably slow.

Reasonable point about Google phones, but they don't have headphone jacks (since the Pixel 4A which is the main one I have any interest in) and from what I can tell, battery replacement is difficult. So I'm hoping to keep using my current phone until phones with those EU-mandated swappable batteries appear.

As mentioned I think my current thought is to write an alternative web front end that is text only. We need something like that anyway.

2
roxyreply
lemmy.world

What phone do you use? You can try out the custom roms that can upgrade your phone and help you avoid e-waste.

2

Moto G4 from around 2017, it's not on the list for Lineage. Custom roms are of interest though I'm a bit hesitant to mess with the roms of the phone that I use all the time. I'm not a fancy phone user but I run a few F-droid apps and make occasional phone calls.

1

Yeah, know what you mean. But trusts me, phones make a lot less ewaste than PCs, TVs, home appliances, etc. It does matter how big the device is, phones are just small, thus, a lot less ewaste is being produced.

1
pseudreply
lemmy.world

My 5yo phone is running Android 13. Get LineageOS.

8
solrizereply
lemmy.world

If I get a new phone while my old one still works, I'll perhaps try a custom rom in the old one. Otherwise it's like messing with a production server.

3
noodlesreply
lemmy.world

Using Android 7 is a huge risk, it's simply not safe, go grab a new phone if you got money

2
solrizereply
lemmy.world

Meh, if Android 7 has so many bugs, the later versions must have even more bugs. I'm not sure quite what I'm supposed to be at risk of. I don't run any Google Play apps, have mobile data turned off most of the time, don't have much really private info on the phone though I do have some auth credentials there (TOTP app that uses some kind of hardware secret store, plus API key for email app). If I had to replace my phone right away it would probably be with another Android phone, but in the long run maybe I'd prefer a Raspberry Pi tablet or something like that, plus a separate voice-only phone or wifi hotspot. Unfortunately VOIP seems to suck badly, at least with the app I've tried (Linphone). And also unfortunately, 2G is dead so I can't cobble together a DIY dumbphone using an ebay module. I don't think they have those for 4G yet.

If you have any particular suggestions of a phone that is 1) cheap, 2) has a headphone jack, 3) has easy to replace battery (having to open the phone with a screwdriver is acceptable, but having to melt adhesives with a high chance of destroying the phone is not). A built-in e-compass for navigation would be nice to have, and a decent camera (the 5MP one that I have now is ok, but the one in the N900 was awful). I don't need any high end features that I can think of. Lowish res screen is fine but it should be large. Wireless charging would be nice but that seems to conflict with easily replaceable battery. I am thinking of the Moto G Power which has some older versions on sale at Best Buy. But again, I'd rather postpone a new phone as long as I can.

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TAGreply
lemmy.world

if Android 7 has so many bugs, the later versions must have even more bugs. I'm not sure quite what I'm supposed to be at risk of.

No, because the latest Android has all of the bug fixes discovered in Android 8-14.

Also, when the developers discover a big in the latest Android, they fix it. When the developers discover a bug in an old version, they check if it is still there in the latest.

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I do understand that newer Android versions incorporate the bug fixes that were found in older versions. But their main purpose as far as I can tell is introducing new features (i.e. bugs) of their own. Android 7 is also not that old as far as this stuff goes. I'm sure lots of people are running even older Android versions on their phone. I still have an Android 2.3 music player (Archos 43) though I don't use it much.

I'm not a heavy user of Android so I tend not to pay too much attention. I'm on a 1GB/month data plan and I usually use less than 1/10th of it, checking email or (in the past) Reddit here or there. The only internet-connected Google app I use much is Maps, though that admittedly is one of the more invasive ones. Is there anything else I should watch out for? I get the impression most vulnerabilities are in apps rather than the OS. Most of my apps are from F-droid and I do keep those updated.

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Xanthraxreply
lemmy.world

That was an issue with reddit to. If there's not enough content/ activity it breaks top post sorting for short periods of time.

I used to follow a lot of niche communities on reddit and that was always an issue. I'd have to put it at a year; month/ day wouldn't work.

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I'm saying waaaaay more active, but I've never been able to find the threshold.

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Frequently getting "404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site" when trying to visit posts here, maybe due to some backend overload. I guess you know about this but mentioning because I didn't notice other posts about it.

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lemmy.world

It's just me or comments posted from this instance to instances in 0.18 don't appear to be syncing?, It's that normal?

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Doesn't the CI pipeline not produce an installable build with that patch applied somewhere?

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If your looking for another app to use in the mean time you can use https://wefwef.app if you add it to your homescreen it will work like a native app.

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Lemmymade seems to work for now. But some features are missing there I think.

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lemmy.world

I have yet to find another app that is consistently reliable and feature rich. Should we just sign up for a different instance until lemmy.world is upgraded?

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sigmasukhreply
lemmy.world

You might try Liftoff or Thunder. I am replying this from Thunder and its working fine for me. You can find both of these apps on f-droid.

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