I like Joplin very much, but I don't want to buy new devices to be able to use Joplin.
At first Joplin stopped on my Acer One because of Windows 32, but I could continue to work with an old version. Now, since version 2.3, it no longer works. And it stopped working on Android 4.4 some time ago. I will probably go back to an old version and no longer update, what a pity.
I don't think its unreasonable to move forwards and drop compatibility for old OSs and old devices. The amount of work that would be required to maintain function on old devices whilst introducing improvements will get to a point where it is unreasonable.
Why don't you look into upgrading the devices instead? Most old netbooks get a much better lease on life by running a modern lightweight linux distro and most older phones can be upgraded to something a tad more modern than KitKat if you are willing to follow a few guides (apparently it makes up a grand total of 1.3% of the global android install base).
It's actually the frameworks and vendors that drop the support for older systems. Electron, react-native, ...
It is impossible to keep backwards compatibility for newer applications1 with systems that are older than 5 years. Google drops the support after 3 years. KitKat is 7 years old.
I compile ffmpeg for macOS and I had to drop support for all versions <10.9. Why? Because 3rd party libraries won't compile for older macOS versions anymore (say thanks to Apple's need to break APIs every year) and even ffmpeg itself has parts that won't compile on older systems.
So, if you want to support systems older than 3 years it becomes increasingly complicated. If you want to support systems that are older than 5 years, it's many times just impossible and in the cases it is possible, it requires one to strip X% of features which is a huge maintenance overhead.
1. if you have a POSIX system and wrote an ANSI C program in the 70s, it might still run, even though you still would have to recompile it since 32bit processors were dropped over 10 years ago.
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You are likely out of luck on Android, but when it comes to Windows x86, this is a known issue (see https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/4649). Check the last few posts in that thread for a workaround to still be able to use the current version of Joplin in your 32-bit system.
Not always an option, e.g. I have a few tablets with Intel Atom that have 32-bit UEFI and as such can't run Windows x64. None of the lightweight Linux desktop environments seem to have proper touchscreen support (i.e. long press to right click, one finger scroll, etc.). GNOME seems to be the only one that is usable with touch, but it is also too heavy for Intel Atom CPUs, which closes the circle. Windows x86 is literally the only (usable) option for these devices.
Year, Y could do it. First 7-zip could not rename the file. I installed Joplin "for me only". With this it worked without any problems. Thank you! With the next update Y will try the script.
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