Last week, the default certificate authority for Discourse announced an incoming change for next year, you can read it in details here:
What that means in the current status of Discourse is that from 2021-01-11T03:00:00Z users on Android version prior to 7.1.1 will be unable to connect to Discourse using Google Chrome. This can be postponed to September if we change how the certificate is requested, but it’s not something we have ready nor planned.
While the blog post shows that this can be a big as 33,8% of the Android users, doing a quick check on the last hour of some our hosting shows this number to be closer to 3%.
The post also tells that one workaround is using Firefox for Android that ships its own updated certificates. Firefox is supported in 97% of the affected users, as it supports Android 5+. And while we don’t support it officially, we do have some enthusiastic Firefox users on the team that keep an eye for basic usability issues.
Going to be watching this one with interest. There are a number of <$100 tablets which are still selling with Android 6 and 7. I saw one project in March hand jobseekers hundreds of tablets running 7.1.
In that case the obvious solution will just be to stop using Let’s Encrypt.
Note that Discourse Hub app will still require Android 7.1.2 or later, but this change by Let’s Encrypt means accessing a https Discourse site via the browser should be OK on older versions of Android, provided the user has an updated browser.
