Drag has an old iPad Mini that stopped working. There’s nothing physically wrong with it. The screen is fine, the battery is fine, the processor is old, but fit for purpose. Apple simply refuses to allow browser updates. It’s not like drag needs the latest and greatest, drag only uses it to browse deviantart and furaffinity. As recently as a year ago it worked perfectly. But these websites no longer serve content properly to old browser versions, so drag needs a way to bypass apple and update the browser.
Drag’s tried Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and even Brave. But apparently all browsers on iOS are just reskins of Safari, so none of these worked.
Is there some way drag could maybe install an Android distribution on the iPad? Or get a proper browser on this machine? Drag despises e-waste and also is broke. It’s not a must-have, drag has a perfectly good phone and PC. But the larger screen size is good for image browsing, and hacking this machine to fix it would be a nice middle finger to Apple’s planned obsolescence.
I’m seeing several reports of people having success with Alook on older iPads
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/alook-browser-8x-speed/id1261944766
No luck. Deviantart is missing the same features as on Chrome, Firefox, and everything else. Can’t tap images to enlarge them, pages stop loading images after hitting a limit, can’t favourite deviations, and there’s a banner saying the browser is out of date and the x to close the banner doesn’t work. And it cost an american dollar, which isn’t much but is still annoying to get nothing out of. Drag’s requested a refund from Apple.