Bounties are always welcome. And it is usually quite effective with us as long as the value in the bounty makes sense.

Companies move on & yeah people do but not everyone at once for a long time. Lots of people hold on to the same phone for many years. Usually people keep them till they break & then theu get a new one. What about the people who buy old pixels easy to put graphene os on & it's cheap forget about them? What really changes besides the ui having more padding & round corners?

"We please the average" is going to loose you users faster the @utxo the webmaster 🧑‍💻 when he dropped support for #Amber on his #Wisp client ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯ Personally, I'm safe for now with my Pixel 10, but I'm not happy about being wrapped up in the "average" bundle 😔

The old processors simply cannot run most of the new animations properly. There is just not enough power to even play things correctly. So the framework already disables most of it, but it cannot disable it all, so everything becomes VERY slow compared to any newer phone. I mean, even on my Pixel 8, Twitter, WhatsApp, Gmail is all VERY slow compared to a pixel 10. And that is just 2 years... But it is visible when putting them side by side. There is no magic to old hardware. They just don't perform. Our standards on what's acceptable for a good UI move on, and the older phones suffer.

All the reason to question why does it need new animations? Whats wrong with flat & animationless?

It's not about animations.. that's just the easy way to see how old technology can't keep up. The entire stack of libraries everybody uses is optimized for instructions and capabilities available in newer phones to match new behaviors expected in new android versions. A lot has changed since pixel 5a, which was launched using an outdated snapdragon 765G processor... Everything is 3x slower in those models when compared to recent midrange 7xx series.