My wife’s FP1 with original Android 4.2 struggles with some apps which require a later Android version (so far no news). One of them is the Conversations messenger which is installed from F-Droid. Now when looking for updates F-Droid always reports to have found a new version of Conversations which must not be installed as it cannot start anyway and the way back goes via uninstall and install the old version again (losing settings and stuff).
So is there a way to blacklist versions in F-Droid? Or is there even anything in F-Droid that should take care of such conflicts automatically?
To be honest, I’m a bit sceptical that it will help here … it might only hide incompatible apps that are not installed yet and not incompatible updates. But let’s see.
Android apps include a manifest in which they declare which minimum Android version they support and which hardware or software features they require. This manifest is read by F-Droid to act accordingly. I think the OS does this checks too when installing, so this is likely happening by a mistake by the app developers, IMO.
Just to follow up on this again: Conversations was only one of a growing number of apps requiring Android 4.4 or higher. So to give the phone a longer life we decided to upgrade to the alpha version. That went pretty smooth and most things work really great considering that it is an alpha version. Just need to find the best alternative to the previous Android AOSP keyboard which supported swiping while the new one doesn’t (and Google keyboard refuses to install)…