32bit support blocking improvements & needing help

🏷️ General
, , ,
1

I have no support/technical question and have seen the support category. (Be aware that direct support questions will be deleted.)

on

Which general topic do you have

There are challenges around 32bit support, and while we added a warning to the setup checks in 2023 that 32bit support would be dropped, it’s time to make a real decision. So, we are seeking input!

The short version

We still kind of support 32bit, but in practice it isn’t working well. Meanwhile, maintaining it is blocking improvements to performance, security and scalability that our (overwhelmingly 64bit) users would benefit from. Unless some volunteers step up to maintain 32bit support and find workarounds for the issues below, we think we should phase it out, with the coming release the last one that maintains the current (limited) level of support.

32bit support is disappearing everywhere

  • 32bit support breaks hard after 2038, and PHP itself will likely drop 32bit support well before that. A proposal to add PHP language features that would help 32bit was denied years ago, with maintainers citing that PHP itself would drop 32bit “soon anyway”.
  • many of the libraries we depend on are dropping or have dropped 32bit support already, leaving us unable to update for some, or keeping patches on top for others.
  • Most of the Linux distributions no longer support it either, neither do many third party apps and nextcloud packages.
  • 32bit affects Raspberry Pi 1 and 2. The popular NextcloudPi project supports Pi’s only starting at the RaspberryPi 3B (which has 64 bit support).

We have recently invested quite some time and effort on fixing issues from our automated test coverage, work we will continue to put in to at least keep 32bit tests working.

We know that 32bit does still matter to some people: there are certainly still users running Nextcloud on Raspberry Pi 1/2, other dev boards, older NAS devices, and older routers. That’s why we’ve kept it going this long, even though most contributors and customers have no need for it.

But we’ve had a warning about the state of 32bit support in the setup screen since 2023, and we think it’s time to move on.

The cost of keeping it “supported”

Our current work to keep 32bit alive comes at a real cost.

  • We’re stuck on older versions of dependencies that still work on 32bit (e.g. maennchen/zipstream), and can’t upgrade to versions with fixes.
  • It blocks adoption of new tech we need, like snowflake IDs: PHP auto-converts big ints to floats on 32bit, losing precision; using them as strings instead just means PHP auto-converts them back to ints when used as array indices, breaking things either way.
  • A number of performance optimizations can’t be applied because they would break on 32bit.
  • And of course there’s the work in fixing test issues.

Without intervention, this situation is getting worse as libraries are no longer maintained. This means more work spend on working around that instead of other bug fixes and improvements. Bringing 32bit support back up to a good level would already be a lot of work, and will become harder and harder.

What we’re proposing

We’re open to volunteers who want to keep 32bit alive: help find workarounds for the issues above, improve the current state of support, and help us figure out how to keep it working longer. But to be clear, this won’t be easy.

If nobody steps up, we’ll make the current reality official:

  • Starting with release 35 (Nextcloud Hub 2026 Summer), we’ll add a warning that 32bit is unsupported going forward. We’ll still aim to make 2026 Summer work correctly on 32bit, as the last officially supported release.
  • We will not immediately break 32bit support. To give a few months discuss and maybe change the plan, we will only really start merging library updates and apply improvements for performance starting near the end of the year.
  • Note that the Nextcloud Hub 2026 Summer release will get security updates for one year, until about October 2027.

That gives people still on 32bit hardware a bit over a year to move to another platform. In the meantime, our 64bit users will finally benefit from scalability and performance improvements that 32bit support has been blocking.

Interested in helping maintain 32bit support? Let us know here and on github, we’d love to hear thoughts on this.

3

It would be interesting to know how many users or downloads of the 32bit version there is. I did not know that was still supported. It does not seem like it would be very common to be running a modern version of next cloud on a system so old that it supports 32bit only. I would think any such system could be replaced with an equivalent or faster system supporting 64bit quite economically.

If needed maybe the last version supporting 32 bit could get security updates a little longer. My experience is from home and small office setups and I do not see any need to support 32bit. If your experience is different it would be interesting to hear.

4

I still use some 32 bit machines occassionally. But there is no data on them that I need to sync automatically. WebClient use there is sufficient for me (so only on client side I still have some 32-bit machines).

5

sadly we don’t have any explicit 32bit version or such, and while we have a little bit of data from our updater, we have no clue who’s using 32bit. So statistics can’t answer our question. But the responses, here, on github and on reddit, didn’t indicate many users…

6

well, it’s not really about the desktop client, it’s about if the server will still operate. There are a number of things the devs want to do that require 64bit support. Including updating a lot of libraries that require it. And thus, the release after the next one would no longer work correctly on 32bit servers…

7

Good afternoon. I did put a message out on fosstodon in regards to Arm7 not being supported. I was left a link to perhaps put some input as a user.

I do agree with the argument for dropping 32bit in terms of server systems, but for clients its a little more complex. Mobile phone technology is only “just” at the state of moving from 32bit to 64bit with phones obviously now starting to be sold with more than 4GB of memory, but many phones in shops are still being sold with 1GB, 2GB, 3GB of memory and these lower end phones (which mine is sadly part of) are starting to miss out on software in which developers are quickly shying away from 32bit models faster than the technology life spans are existing - which I do of course understand, but due to the availability of the cheaper lower end phones more people are still buying them. I think 32bit phones will be around for at least another 5 or so years before they are just not capable any more. I know technology is forever striving to move forward, but when it comes to Mobile technology, I think its at the point where that change is not moving as fast as developers are wanting the move.

I used to work in the IT industry and I saw computers move over night from 486 computers to PIII (I know, if you are of age, I can hear you drawling lol) literally over night. The technology took the leap shortly after with processor technology jumping at an extraordinary rate to pretty much where we are now - but Mobile technology I personally think is still lagging behind. At the time the PIII was released most of us had the Nokia 3310 and the smart phone would not make an appearance for at least another 10 years. I can see a bottleneck in essence where phone technology is trying to now compete with PC technology and that race is running at a pace that consumers are finding pretty baffling. It feels like only yesterday I was standing in front of a shop looking at a Samsung Galaxy S3 and thinking wow, some day - and in such a short time we are on Samsung Galaxy S26 - i think consumers fear waking up to what is going to be released tomorrow because its always something more powerful than yesterday - but as we know, the very basic software in form of Android has barely changed much since Android 9, its just fancy and styled different with more restrictions than yesteryear.

With the average phone prices constantly on the up, with newer phones at around £2000, people do still look to a bargain, especially when money is becoming more and more worthless as the days go on. I would love a brand new top of the range mobile, who wouldn’t - but for some of us, we cannot afford it. We still have to make do with the affordable budget phone at the local superstore and with daily lives being hampered by the costs of attempting to live, its starting to become a race some of us poorer people are afraid of not surviving. Just today my shopping bill for the most basics of food for 1 week hit £104, which is just completely unheard of a few years ago, there is no way I could personally afford a phone with food shopping hitting highs like that.

I am sorry for writing all this, i know its probably worthless (like i feel at the moment), but I wanted to just say that lots of people still use 32 bit phones as the client system, I honestly think that might last for a while and yes, even if I had a mega amazing top of the range phone, I would still make the same argument because i honestly feel mobile tech is becoming so far out of actual consumers ability to purchase that unless you have a brilliant job, many will just go for the most affordable option at the local super market and they are for the most part, still 32bit phones.

8

I think the topic is referring mainly to the server repository with php 32/64bit.

The client-side is a different topic I think. I can’t even say which clients support 32 and/or 64 bit.