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.

  • aluminium@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    Last time I checked ARM v7 is not the issue, there are still up to date builds available from Chrome itsself or Brave, rather Android 6 is. Google seems to have a cycle where roughly every fall they drop another Android version.

    Right now the minium requirement is Anroid 8 and if the cycle continues it will loose support in a few months and Android 9 will be the new minimum requirement.

    However I also have a a few Android 6 or 7 devices and usually firefox runs fine on them if they at least have two proper large CPU cores. But using two year old Chromium based browsers, I never ran into any sites that wouldn’t work correctly.

      • thehellrocc@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        5 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)

      • foremanguy@lemmy.ml
        0·
        5 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?

  • infeeeee@lemm.ee
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.

  • Orfeluh@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Android There is this browser it supports arm32, I don’t see support for armeabi v7a, I don’t know will it work, not really familiar with tech side of that

    https://www.viayoo.com/en/ This is browser for older devices, very lightweight, even managed to install older version on Android 2.3.4

    https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/ And this is Firefox fork, maybe it will run more smoothly than Firefox

    • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      5 months ago

      Thorium doesn’t care much about security that is essential in my case.

      Didn’t expect a recommendation of Chinese proprietary software in this community ngl.

      Isn’t Fennec just the codename of the official Android version of Firefox?