Hermit 28 — Huge Upgrades Under the Hood!
Jun 13, 2025
Hermit 28 is a huge upgrade, but you likely won’t even notice, because most changes are under the hood!
In-House Telemetry
We at Chimbori value your privacy, and Hermit 28 makes a big leap in that direction.
It’s an unfortunate truth that any large piece of software will contain bugs that will cause it to occasionally crash. Unlike with web apps, when a mobile app crashes (Android or iOS), developers have no way of knowing what caused it or how many users were affected, unless this information is shared directly from the devices the app runs on.
Over the years, Chimbori Apps have relied on third-party tools such as Fabric, Crashlytics, Firebase, and AppCenter to collect and analyze this telemetry data to provide crash insights. With AppCenter shutting down soon, we looked at the available options on the market, and decided that the time was right to bring this functionality in-house.
Although crash report information has always been anonymized (since we do not collect personal information in the first place), and optional (you can turn it off permanently via App Settings), bringing this in-house means we are no longer reliant on the privacy policies of third-party vendors.
Speedier Loading of All Lite Apps
In Hermit 27, we migrated internal data structures from a file-based system to a database-backed system. You may likely already have noticed performance improvements from this transition when opening Lite Apps.
After many months of waiting patiently for bug reports, we received no more than 3 across millions of users. This tiny number helped validate our careful, controlled approach & we are now confident that this has been a successful migration.
Sandbox Improvements
In the Sandbox Settings UI, Hermit now shows a list of all Lite Apps in each Sandbox. This can help you figure out why a particular Sandbox may be taking up a lot of storage or cached data on your device.
Targets Android 15
Although Hermit has been running seamlessly on devices running Android 15 for many months now, including full-screen edge-to-edge UI for every screen, this upgrade means Hermit can take advantage of certain niche features that are only available on Android 15.
Support for Android 16 (targetSdk 36) is coming soon, once we finish our detailed testing & conformance checks.
That’s it for now, enjoy!
