I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
If they want to use an old phone, they can just stop updating their apps and not installing new apps.I still own a iPad 3 with the same, old, software stack from 2013. It still works, I can do things. I just don't expect todays developers to make a herculean effort so that I can run their apps on my old device.It is not just the overhead of supporting multiple different OS versions with different technologies, it is also that this support takes a lot of time while there's a tiny fraction of people that, like the author, use an old phone.I've worked on apps with +1Mio users, and we did have users who were on very old devices using apps which were severely outdated. Those were maybe 1000-2000 of the one million. Adding a constant additional workload of up to 30% (you also have to run CI and everything on older devices) for 1000-2000 users is just not feasible.If you want to continue to use older hardware, just accept that you also have to use older software.I also don't expect to be able to run VSCode on a 1996 Pentium 60. I'd run Emacs instead, or Vim, or whatever else was en vogue in 1996