Whew, rough :)

The whole "let's make an Android device for seniors/the blind/whoever and pin it on an ancient Android version/spec it really low but charge a premium" thing is unfortunately not new.

If you look at the Blindshell 2 and 3 you see plenty of this happening as well, not to mention way more expensive hardware like the BrailleSense Polaris which last time I checked ran on Android 5, scary "Mind updating right now please?" Google Play warnings and everything.

If it helps any, Talkback does have a set of keyboard commands it responds to, perhaps making your keypad buttons fire those means the implementation might be less brittle but given what you've already had to deal with maybe just not touching it ever again might be thebest thing at this point :)

Disclaimer: Actually blind Android user/developer

yeah, it feels like profiting off of people's accessibility needs, which is pretty sad, but unfortunately, that's the world we live in ;'(

really cool to hear from someone who's actually affected by all of this though! and thanks for the talkback tip, i should look more into that

It’s a market size to staffing to cost thing. It’s not an evil thing.

The reality is serving a niche market does not generate enough top line revenue to fund large teams to keep the product going at state of the art.