When your device lies about its compatibility

Posted on by Michael G

Author: paulali
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TWIF generated on Thursday, 09 May 2024, Week 19

Community News

SimpleX Chat was updated to 5.6.1 but only for armv7 compatible devices. That “only … compatible” sounded odd to you? Well, it’s a interesting story.

First, the arm64 build failed, upstream fixed it and next version builds as we speak. Second, we touched upon arm64-only devices at the end of December 2023 when we talked about how we had to rebuilt Silence, the encrypted SMS app, to make it compatible and available for them too. We are bringing at least one more app into this arm64 future, so stay tuned for more!

Back to SimpleX, the F-Droid team was pinged this week in an issue thread as devs and users thought F-Droid Client might behave unexpectedly. While we saw an issue regarding how F-Droid sorts package versions, that was quickly fixed for the soon to be released 1.20, the real issue was elsewhere… in the reporting users Android version.

F-Droid Client logic is not that complicated, it reads the device information, like Android version, processor architecture and some other features, and decides based on this which package to install. For an app that has no architecture depending libraries, like F-Droid itself, it will always install the same package, for apps that have them, like SimpleX, it matches the right package with the device architecture.

In the case of Silence, before our rebuild, F-Droid saw that some devices could do only arm64, had no package to install, so it marked the app as incompatible and the user could not install it.

The user that reported the SimpleX issue told F-Droid to install the best package, it chose arm64, and that was crashing. The user tried to manually install the other package, armv7, and that one worked fine. Surely there’s a bug in F-Droid as it did not install the ‘compatible’ package, right? I spoiled it above, that’s wrong. It appears that, while the device processor is fine and runs in a myriad of other devices in a compatible way with both armv7 and arm64, the device manufacturer provides an Android version that, infuriatingly, announces it as arm64 but it is not always compatible. The user could install other arm64 apps just fine, but not SimpleX, making debugging confusing at least.

This reminds me of SimpleX’s efforts along the way to bring their app to more devices, as they started as Android 10+ and arm64 only back in 2022, and future 5.7.1 will be available on Android 8+ and both arm64 and armv7.

/PS: As with past TWIFs we ask you, the users, to get the newest Android version available for your device, and to explore if projects like Calyx, Divest and Lineage support it. Android development is frustrating enough for developers to navigate between versions, architectures and targets, having an old and buggy Android base system is not helpful to anyone.

Newly Added Apps

4 apps were newly added
  • Kitsune – Discover new anime & manga and manage your Kitsu.io library
  • Open Biking – Bluetooth application for generating training on an indoor bike
  • Self Attendance Tracker – Attendance Tracker for students with focus on UI and usability
  • mensen – Access the menu of Dresden’s canteens

Updated Apps

105 more apps were updated

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