If you mean the new Android 8 features only matter to developers, I guess I can sympathize with the Jerboa devs choosing to use them if it really made the dev work easier. From a user perspective though, Android 7 does everything I need, and RedReader shows that a Reddit viewer app can work fine in Android 7. I can't think of anything a Lemmy app needs to do that a Reddit app doesn't, though maybe I'm missing something.

I don't particularly want to become an Android app developer. That's sort of like becoming a Windows developer. I use Android basically due to lack of alternatives. 3g networks around here are now all shut down, so my Maemo phones are useless as phones, even if they weren't intolerably slow.

Reasonable point about Google phones, but they don't have headphone jacks (since the Pixel 4A which is the main one I have any interest in) and from what I can tell, battery replacement is difficult. So I'm hoping to keep using my current phone until phones with those EU-mandated swappable batteries appear.

As mentioned I think my current thought is to write an alternative web front end that is text only. We need something like that anyway.