My somewhat vague sense is that Firefox only ever supported Amazon devices because of a partnership. The partnership ended and there wasn't any other reason to maintain support.

In turn Amazon only partnered because there wasn't a YouTube app, and via Firefox they could support YouTube. But they reached a deal with YouTube (maybe using Firefox as leverage), so it didn't matter to them any longer.

Fire OS 7 is based on Android 9 with API level 28. So, yeah, it's not exactly cutting edge.

API 28 is released in 2018, 2 versions behind the latest.

It's a sad state of software development that we so quickly drop support for older hardware, it contributes massively to e-waste, although Android manufacturers shoulder a lot of the blame for not supporting OS upgrades.

Context: Put out a (hopefully) final release for API 16 last month. It'll mean that 15,000 people can no longer update the app. From analytics, we still have users on Android 1.5 (API 3)

Wowie, how many users run api 3?

Negligible: 26 today, up from ~3 around Q4 2020.

Not sure if that's Google Play's metrics being played with, but it's shocking that there appear to be installs on something that old (it's well before TLS 1.2 support on Android, and most of the internet will be broken)

It may sound unbelievable, but to most Android users out there, Android 9 is cutting edge!

Android 8 user here, because I got tired of hunting for half-working internet supported releases for my phone. Plus, to be honest, I lament the 2.3 times: apps were literally 100x smaller, and the OS was much simpler from every perspective.

I still have a HTC Desire with the last 2.3 based MIUI, and that OS is still wonderful.

Do you get security updates though? I stopped getting them in Dec 2019. Forcing my hand to move over to a phone with Android 9 that gets quarterly security updates still(on March 2021 now I think). I realize this is a manufacturer/carrier thing as far as I know, and I'd like to go back to a nice clean debloated 8.1 or whatever. But I feel like I'm dragged kicking and screaming along the path of forced obsolescence just skimming over the security stuff that apparently I'm never going to get if I don't upgrade phones.

Honestly it's just really annoying. I've toyed around with Lineage and such but at some point it seems it got a lot harder to do things on a lot of models and carrier configs. It seems you need to really research exactly what phone model is open enough and has enough people graciously doing open source work to support updates and such outside of the manufacturer and carrier.

> Do you get security updates though

Nope. And I even stopped updating Firefox, because their move to Quantum on Android made a great browser and abysmal experience.

Once this phone dies, I'll go and buy a Fairphone, hoping that might be kept alive a bit longer with updates.

I only buy Android One phones now. Monthly security updates for several years, guaranteed. Pretty stock Android, too.

Great? Perhaps not. But much better than the phones manufacturers just dump onto the market and then forget about.

I thought Android One devices had stopped receiving regular updates? I know I read a report that most/all of them had yet to receive Android 11 two months ago and that security updates were now being released months after they used to be. If I recall that report correctly, it sounded like new devices had all but stopped being released and that it seemed like the program is on life support now. I know that program was very locale-specific, so maybe that was just in the US?

Yeah, pretty much, looks like Android 9, 10 & 11 only add up to 63.2% of Android market share ?

https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-android-sdk-versions

Two versions behind is actually better than the majority of Android phones in the wild.

But isn't Firefox even supports Android 5 devices?

The latest version works fine on my x86 phone with Android 5.

> x86 phone

Sorry, what? I think I need to know more...

Possibly something like an Asus ZenFone 2 (ZE551ML) which has an Intel Atom processor, and a binary translator to run ARM code, for compatibility reasons.

It was actually a good beast at the time. And was subsidized so it was cheap for the specs.

That's wild. Why would they make something like that? Does it dual-boot Windows or something?

There was a period (back in 2016 or so?) where Intel was really gunning for the phone space with their Atom SoCs. I imagine they gave very good deals to Asus to put them into their products (undoubtedly large “marketing support” dollars were involved). Alas the lack of progress on Intel’s side combined with the utter domination of ARM basically killed Intel’s hopes at the phone CPU market.

> There was a period (back in 2016 or so?) where Intel was really gunning for the phone space with their Atom SoCs.

The whole Meego project (Nokia + Intel, 2009 from the top of my head) was founded with the goal of getting Intel phones. When Nokia jumped ship in February 2011, Intel still continued and hired Nokia engineers to make phones. How long they tried, I have no idea.

Desktop Windows won't run there directly (but works just fine virtualized under qemu, I should add). It's a pretty typical all-in-one SoC, but with an x86 core:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/75203/i...

But I can copy statically linked binaries from my main Linux machine, and they work. (Dynamically linked typically don't because Android userspace is so different from "proper" Linux.)

Why do you live your life like this?!?

I get this. I have a low spec phone by today's standards, and it has android 10, it is pretty useless practically. It is pretty much stock. And I would gladly go back some versions for speed hikes.

I have three libraries supporting API 14, one app API 16 and another API 21. There's rarely a reason not to support at least API 21 for general apps. Almost only very specific and niche APIs were added after that. Not supporting at least API 24 is unreasonable and most likely due to ignorance. Java 8 is only supported since API 24, but everybody switched to Kotlin ages ago.

I'm on kitkat 4.4. I hope in 10 years to reach 9.

Android 9 is when that system ended for me, as Google completely disabled call recording by 3rd party apps. It's a must have feature if you want to have any defence against scamming insurance companies and so on. Probably they were losing too much money when people were able to call their lies and demand refunds, so they must have somehow convinced Google to remove this feature altogether.

It was definitely a conspiracy between Google and insurance companies and not that the feature was a security/privacy risk used by too few people to be worth investing in developing in a manner which eliminated the risk.

What do you mean? Pretty much every one I know used to record calls. It is perfectly legal in my country. If Google was concerned about security / privacy why they didn't disable cameras as well?

How are the security updates situation for the Fire OS devices?

What dissapoints me is that it's not even available on Android TV/Google TV. Sure you can sideload it, but the controls are tailored for the Amazon Fire Stick remote.

That's hilarious, because when independent, unfunded web devs make the same calculation to drop Firefox support, we get screamed at.

Note that the Firefox app for Fire TV is very different and much more limited than the Firefox mobile app.