Chromium… I’m so getting downvoted with this one.

Anyways,

I have an old Android 6 phone that is still not completely unusable and my older family members want to use it as a backup phone (in fact, they already do). They can’t live without Facebook (obviously) so I installed Firefox on it and made a PWA for Facebook. It works surprisingly well but Firefox itself is quite sluggish and slow to open on that piece of hardware. So I’m thinking of installng a Chromium browser on it, as well as on my other old devices to make them run a bit better and just out of my extremely unhealthy curiosity.

But the problem is they all do not support modern arm64 apps that most Android phones use nowadays. Instead they need this other type called armeabi-v7a. There were Chromium based browsers that had a v7a version (Bromite for example) but they all suspiciously died at the same time more than a year ago. Does Chromium really not support the old architecture (or whatever it is) anymore or I’m just not searching well enough?

P. S. Advices to buy a newer device will not be accepted and will be treated with appropriate level of hostility.

      • foremanguy
        1·
        6 months ago

        I agree for Cromite, but maybe you should double check Mulch? On fdroid it is said only armeabi-v7a…

        EDIT : As seen on another comment maybe try to install Lineage, what’s the phone reference?

        • GolfNovemberUniformOP
          1·
          6 months ago

          Mulch needs A8.

          The phone is already on LOS. There are no newer ROMs for it that don’t break 99% of the features, including IMEI.

      • thehellrocc@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        The Cromite GitHub page also says it supports arm32-v7a right at the beginning (for some reason later in the README it lists the platforms again without it, someone probably forgot to change it), I believe it’s the file in the releases called arm_ChromePublic.apk (not arm64), so try that

        (Note: it does say it’s Android 7 or higher though, so it still might not work unless you try some custom ROMs)

        • GolfNovemberUniformOP
          1·
          6 months ago

          Ok I guess I am actually blind. I checked many times and didn’t see the arm file. Now I see it. I’ll try it when I can.

          Also the phone is already on a custom ROM. There are newer ones but they break absolutely everything, including IMEI.