The 0.18 version of Lemmy was announced. This will solve many issues.
But we can’t upgrade yet because the captcha was removed, and captcha relied on Websockets, which are removed in 0.18 so despite the devs agreeing on my request to add captcha back, this will not be until 0.18.1. Without captcha we will be overrun by bots.
Hopefully this 0.18.1 will be released soon, because another issue is that the newest version of the Jerboa app won’t work with servers older than 0.18. So if you’re on Lemmy.world, please (temporarily) use another app or the web version.
I do understand that newer Android versions incorporate the bug fixes that were found in older versions. But their main purpose as far as I can tell is introducing new features (i.e. bugs) of their own. Android 7 is also not that old as far as this stuff goes. I’m sure lots of people are running even older Android versions on their phone. I still have an Android 2.3 music player (Archos 43) though I don’t use it much.
I’m not a heavy user of Android so I tend not to pay too much attention. I’m on a 1GB/month data plan and I usually use less than 1/10th of it, checking email or (in the past) Reddit here or there. The only internet-connected Google app I use much is Maps, though that admittedly is one of the more invasive ones. Is there anything else I should watch out for? I get the impression most vulnerabilities are in apps rather than the OS. Most of my apps are from F-droid and I do keep those updated.