OpenGL ES 2.0: Is there a way around the lack of texture in the vertex shader?

I am currently testing OpenGL ES 2.0 with Android for the game. My map is the 2nd grid map with a height value for each position. Now I wanted to save the heights of each coordinate in the texture in order to search for heights in the vertex shader.

The advantage of this idea would be that I can create a common grid of triangles and place it (with an offset) in the position of the map that the user is currently looking at. Due to the bias, I can omit the need to create a new grid of triangles every time the user moves his view position and height profile, which I would read from the texture.

Now the problem is that many modern Android devices (even Galaxy S3) do not support texture search in the vertex shader. Unfortunately, this completely destroys my current approach.

My question is: is there any other way to extract data from the memory of the graphics card in the vertex shader? Without specifying data for each vertex directly, which would make me (as far as I know) recreate the height map every time the user changes the position of the view. (Creating a height map every time the user changes the position of the view slows down ...)

Thank you for your help + best wishes,

Andreas