Firefox for Android does not support Material UI, has a low minimum API level, and generally seems lacking in features. Why is that?
Edit 1: also the downloading function is super unstable, I lost several files due to firefox starting the download then stopping and removing the download for no reason.
Every app has a minimum API level. The older the Android version, the more expensive it becomes to maintain it. What features do you miss?
My question is why they don’t bump their min api.
For example brave support android 8 and up while firefox supports android 5 and up.
Supporting old api versions means the app is supported by more phones. International android versions can be quite old. While supporting old api versions may seem bad, it doesn’t mean that Firefox cannot take advantage of new api features too. The code can simply check if the new features are available and use them.
Why do you care what the supported api version is?
I think people can be running pretty old versions of Android everywhere, assuming they don’t change their phones every two years when support for their current device ends. They might still want to use an up-to-date web browser.
There’s just no reason we shouldn’t expect 99% of new apps to run on older phones, and to hell with the entire industry for normalizing it.
Well, there is a reason and that reason is lack of security support but that is not inherent to the old hardware.
This link would explain to you why supporting old versions of android is bad
The topmost answers there are basically explaining why it’s sometimes convenient for developers to drop support for old versions. I don’t see any of them making a case for the zany idea that “supporting old versions is bad.”
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Bruh because then the app will not work on older phones and it can even be slower