A cracked screen and a tired battery matter a lot less once it’s a frame - mine hangs on a wall on a charger and never runs on battery. If the battery is swollen rather than just weak, don’t leave it charging unattended though.
Nothing gets installed on the tablet either, it’s just Safari in fullscreen pointed at the add-on, so an iPad that can’t take app updates anymore is fine.
Correcting myself here: I actually have it running on an iPad 1, so it’s worth a try after all.
My baseline when building the layouts is Safari 9, so I can’t promise every screen looks exactly right that far back. If something does render oddly on yours, tell me what it looks like and I’ll have a go at fixing it.
iPad 2 should actually be fine. It tops out at iOS 9.3.5, and Safari 9 is exactly the baseline I build against - that’s why the layouts use plain px sizes and table-based fallbacks instead of flex gap and clamp(), which that Safari silently throws away.
When an old iPad “can’t open modern web pages” it’s usually the TLS certificates rather than the page itself. SnapFrame is served from your own HA box over plain http on your LAN, so that part doesn’t apply.
If you try it and something renders wrong, tell me the iOS version and what looks off - that’s the hardware the whole project is aimed at.
Straight answer: SnapFrame won’t replace the timers and the shopping list. It does photos, a weather screen, and a bin-collection reminder - that’s the lot.
For a kitchen tablet the usual setup is a Home Assistant dashboard in a kiosk browser, where you can put a timer helper and a to-do list on screen, and SnapFrame as the thing it falls back to when nobody’s using it.
The display side is just a fullscreen web page, so an Android tablet is no problem at all - old iPad Safari was the hard part, Android browsers are easy in comparison.