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.
FFUpdater supports Android 5+: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.marmaro.krt.ffupdater/ You can install a lot of browsers from there, maybe one of them supports this phone: https://github.com/Tobi823/ffupdater
Also check slimsocial, it’s a facebook client, supports Android 4.4+ and it lists arm7 support: https://f-droid.org/hu/packages/it.rignanese.leo.slimfacebook/
And new Chinese phones (Redmi, HMD, etc) are really cheap, they are good as a backup smartphone. I know it sounds terrible, but you can’t really do anything with planned obsolescence. Our time is short on this planet, waiting for websites on old hardware simply doesn’t worth it, you should spend this time on more important things.
As I said, recommendations of buying a new device will be met with hostility so here we go.
This is very much not true. There are things you can’t do (like make a 1980s Macintosh be able to browse modern Reddit and play CP2077) but you really can do a lot to fight planned obsolescence. Custom ROMs, Linux distros, RAM upgrades, alternative front-ends/apps and the list goes on. In many cases it makes the devices usable. I know you may want planned obsolescence to continue its existence in case you’re working in an evil organization that makes it happen but I am not falling for it. There’s also the ecological impact of it that is very serious if you ask me.
Facebook itself works pretty well on the device and it’s actually not much slower than on the person’s main phone which is an almost flagship one. I was just curious if I can install Chromium to experiment with it.
And thank you for reminding me of alternative front-ends. I might take a look at it.