Very un-appy with eBay

My first proper post of this year is unfortunately another rant about the bizarre actions of a tech giant, this time eBay for their inexplicable decision to remove their mobile app's compatibility with older Android versions and woefully inadequate response to the resulting backlash. It all started when I did a factory reset on my phone. It's a Samsung Galaxy S2, which may be old but I've looked after it so it still works fine and perfectly suits my needs of reading emails, Facebook browsing, a few calls and texts, and the occasional photo. I deplore the wastefulness of modern society and can't stand to see perfectly functional products thrown away simply because they're old, so I can't justify replacing the old S2 to myself while it still works.

The reset installed Android Jelly Bean 4.1.2, the newest version of the operating system officially supported by this device. Everything was going well and all the apps I installed worked fine - until I tried to install the eBay app, only for the app store to refuse to download it as it is "not compatible with my device". Huh? The version I had before worked fine, going from version 4.0 to 4.1 isn't even a major upgrade and Android 4.1.2 was released only about five years ago so it's hardly an ancient obsolete operating system that no one uses anymore. Being unsupported but still usable is one thing but incompatible and totally unusable is quite another, so how come the eBay app is no longer compatible with my OS and why aren't eBay doing anything about it?

Why are links from Facebook crashing my browser?

Another tech post detailing a problem that's really starting to annoy me but I haven't managed to find a solution to. Whenever I try to follow a link to an external website from the Facebook app for Android, it crashes the browser with that patronising and unhelpful 'Unfortunately, Internet has stopped' message. Having read that Android's built-in 'Internet' browser is not the best, I downloaded Chrome from the app store, only for the exact same thing to happen. The browser starts to load, but before the URL even appears in the address bar, it shuts down and generates the error message so I can't even see the URL it's trying to load.

This behaviour is consistent with any external link from Facebook, regardless of the external site's address, and is getting so frustrating as it seems something very simple has been overlooked somewhere. I don't know if the cause is the Facebook app formatting URLs in a way that common browsers can't understand, or something missing from the browsers' URL handling, but I suspect the former as the problem occurs in multiple browsers. If anyone has any further information, or even better a solution, please leave a comment as this problem is starting to drive me mad.