My phone came with Android 6, the vendor shipped an upgrade to Android 7, and I installed that. They didn't release any more upgrades. The phone hardware itself is still perfectly good so I really don't want to take part in a hardware upgrade treadmill just because the vendors like to play Wintel. I'm typing this on a laptop from 2011 (Thinkpad X220) that also still works (hasn't fallen apart yet), running Debian 11. It won't run the latest Windows but I don't care.

I still haven't heard any type of explanation what of what stops Jerboa from working with older Androids. If it would take a total rewrite then I can understand the devs not wanting to do that. If it means changing a #define then I'd say change the #define. As a general matter I find Lemmy's web design to be bloatier and more annoying than old.reddit so I'm not sure I would like Jerboa anyway (I haven't seen it). I appreciate the work that the devs and ops have put into Lemmy but Ifrankly prefer the user interfaces of 40 year old Usenet readers to these Javascript pages that squirm all over the screen. So I want to keep persuing text based viewers like RedReader and Gnus. I'd try Jerboa if it was convenient for me to do so, but I'm not going to buy a new phone to run a program that I have doubts about to begin with.