Really unhappy today when I went to my mobile to review some words and found it wouldn’t open and to go to the play store only to be told that the new app was not compatible with my phone.
Will not buy a new phone when the one I have works perfectly and it is much more environmently friendly to not keep changing your phone.
There should be the facility to carry on with the older app.
I need to use the one on my phone rather than the computer because of tendonitis when I use a keyboard for any length of time so now I am now stuck.
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It’s just their whim to force users to have the latest version of the app. From the users’ point of view there’s no improvements, they are not fixing old bugs, stats page is getting on your way to courses.
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We understand it’s frustrating, but it is necessary for us to do this sometimes, older versions of operating systems have less functionality and this can block us from developing a modern app experience. We try to support as many old versions as we can and we generally support operating systems far longer than the device manufacturers themselves do with their security updates.
The reason we have to force people to upgrade rather than let people use old versions forever is so we can make changes to our backend services, if a version of the app expects a certain backend service in a certain format then we have to keep supporting it or the app version would break. This leads to us having vast amounts of technical debt and complications and slows down our ability to create new features. Sometimes we need to move people to a newer version so we can have a tidy up, it’s not a decision we take lightly and we try to affect as few users as possible, in this case it’s about 1 in 300 users.
In your circumstance, if you don’t feel able to upgrade your phone, or use a physical keyboard, I’d recommend using the mobile version of our website on your phone, we work hard to make it responsive to different device sizes and it should work almost as well as the native apps.
Thank you for your reply. In my disappointment I didn’t think of using the browser on my phone as the app is so easy to use. I have given it a go as I will be sticking with my 7 year old phone for some time. It is not as responsive and a bit more fiddly but is usable. I don’t know how many users you have but 1 in 300 could still be a large number of users.
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Hi @James_g_memrise, I guess it would be helpful to have an announcement/ warning before a new version is launched (ideally if you knew which OS would not work) as I’m sure most people would rather continue with the old version with limited functionality.
I’m afraid you misunderstood, in this instance the choice is to upgrade or not use the app as we have retired backend functionality the very old versions if the app needed to function.
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Thanks for explaining James.
I had assumed that the old version would still function albeit with some limitations.