Why it’s time to support only Android 4.0 and above

http://dannyroa.com/2013/10/17/why-its-time-to-support-only-android-4-0-and-above/

by purpl3p3rs0n • 13 years ago

28 45 13 years ago

MAGZine4• 13 years ago

I feel that supporting Android 2.3 at this time is roughly equivalent to supporting IE6. For the majority of people, just stop targeting 2.3 support as a requirement. Perhaps it'll net you some additional marketshare in emerging markets, but for the most part, ≥API14 is ubiquitous to a point where this is a sensible decision.

atlanticus2• 13 years ago

Not supporting IE6 will cost you lucrative enterprise dollars, Android 2.3, while popular, is not nearly as profitable.

edwintorok• 13 years ago

There is a big difference though. People who run IE6 would be usually capable of running some more recent browser, but for various reasons choose not to. People who are stuck with Android 2.x are stuck because their hardware can't support newer versions of Android (well there are various custom ROMs that "work" with various degree of success on older devices, but not really in a usable form).

MAGZine4• 13 years ago

There are certain circumstances where you want to support ie6, though not many outside enterprisey things.

ie6 has lost widespread support. Heck, google stopped supporting it three years ago

nawitus• 13 years ago

<API14 is 30.8% of the user base.

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

IE6 is 4.9%

http://www.ie6countdown.com/

They're completely different.

richkz• 13 years ago

Perhaps worth looking at the drill down based on country/language...

Zikes• 13 years ago

I'm no Android developer, but with as many API versions I know of for Android it's not hard to imagine that the development experience is very similar. Supporting <API14 may cost more in development and support than the potential customer base gain, especially if the target market is the sort that would have newer devices.

jere3• 13 years ago

Yea, I think that's a pretty bad comparison. If you look at the IE graph you posted, it's less than 1% in the US.

Another graph that might make things easier to visualize (the blue and above is who we're talking about abandoning): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Android-dist-by-dessert.pn...

donretag• 13 years ago

Most users can easily upgrade their browser if forced to. Upgrading your phone is not as easy.

maaku3• 13 years ago

Site is giving me a database error, so I'm committing the sin of posting based only on the title :(

Hipster Mountain View/Palo Alto is not the world. Most people who manage to afford to buy a smartphone, use the thing until it dies. I personally just upgraded from an Android 2.3 device, and my latest Apple device is on iOS 2. And I read Hacker News for christ's sake.

Maybe for your app, your community the norms are different. But be careful not to bias your data - you better be sure that you are not unknowingly turning away people who would be customers if only you supported their device.

dannyr6• 13 years ago

Need to resize my server. Can't handle traffic.

Read the blog post then decide.

Wrote perspective from different Android devs in the blog post.

projct• 13 years ago

caching?

imperio592• 13 years ago

You can't scale your blog server but you're an authority on what version of Android to support?

Cool story bro.

rocky1138• 13 years ago

I use an Android 2.3 device. I'm not paying for a new phone until this one breaks.

On a side note, I'd love to update the software on it, but Samsung/Telus have not offered an upgrade path. So, 2.3 it is.

th3dude• 13 years ago

I think this is the true problem.

How many devices are out there that could be running 4.0+ but aren't due to manufacturer or carrier interference? Not everyone is capable of rooting and installing custom versions of the OS.

Android fragmentation is purely a manufacturer/carrier issue. To the article's point, maybe developers can help that process by enforcing 4.0+.

ProblemFactory• 13 years ago

Even in the world outside of "hipster palo alto", 70% of active Android users are on 4.0+: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html It seems to be growing 5% per month, so already by the end of the year 2.3 market share might fall below 10%.

Starting from 4.0, many APIs were cleaned up, many bugs were fixed, and it seems that many carriers/manufacturers have stopped shipping bizarrely broken custom modifications.

Unless you have a large development team and absolutely must reach every possible customer, targeting 4.0 and upwards seems to be the most efficient choice.

maaku3• 13 years ago

And by the middle of next spring, the number of users on 2.3 will be negative!

saurik• 13 years ago

FWIW, remember that these figures are biased in construction.

Less importantly, they only take into account devices that have the Play Store (which you might consider your audience, but there are tons of people in the world happy to buy things from alternative markets available on their devices).

However, and this is somewhat insidious: they measure devices used in the last seven days. How often do normal users "actively visit the Play Store"? I find it highly unlikely that every normal user does so at least once every week.

In fact, I would be much less surprised by a universe where people only "visit the Play Store" once a month at best, and only when there's something specific for them to be doing (maybe they hear about a new product, and go to download).

I would then further submit that this frequency decreases the older the device is: during the first month of owning your device, you probably have tons of things you suddenly realize you want, because the device comes with no apps installed.

With an expectation curve on the usage of the device thereby working against older devices, you will see a chart that only looks at the most recent 7 days biased towards recent versions as the probability of older versions dips.

Let's look at what happens then if we posit that the average 2.3 user is using the Play Store once every four weeks, while the average 4.x user is using the Play Store once every two weeks: this mild skew makes 30/70 become almost 50/50.

Are these people who are using 2.3 really outside of your target market because they only download an app every month instead of every couple weeks? If you market to them, and make it clear your app supports them, will they not buy it?

While that might be true, it isn't something you can support with just these numbers from Google. It's even worse, in fact, when you remember that when Google was tracking "active devices" instead of "devices actively visiting Play" the 2.3/4.x split was so far in the other direction as to be unbelievable, and when Google decided "fine, we are limiting it to active users" the numbers jumped.

And now, we see the numbers creeping better and better... but did you notice that they changed the time range from 2 weeks to 7 days in the few months since Apple lambasted their uptake at WWDC? If not, you aren't paying enough attention ;P, as that's a really critical detail: Google keeps moving the goal post, so you can't take any solace in "we are making progress".

gcb0• 13 years ago

as someone who paid google $600 for a nexus one that can only run 2.3 (2.3.3 with CM), i'm very offended. Even more so because they could have easily ported all the features such as browser rendering engine to the device.

onebaddude• 13 years ago

Most people who manage to afford to buy a smartphone, use the thing until it dies.

I've been making this argument for a while, whenever someone cries about fragmentation, mainly from my personal experience. I'm a "techy"; I want the latest and greatest. But in my family there are 4 Android users, 3 of which don't know what version they're running, or care in the least. They use the phone to make calls, check email, text, browse the internet and maybe download an app or two. Every version of Android has those capabilities.

e28eta• 13 years ago

and maybe download an app or two

So, as an app developer, ignoring them would not be a terrible thing.

Zigurd4• 13 years ago

I'ma let him finish when his site comes up, but here why I generally recommend targeting Android 4:

1. If you want to make a UI that scales across all device sizes, and you don't want to use hacks like ActionBarSherlock that will become a maintenance headache after the moment of convenience, build your app skeleton around Android 4 APIs.

2. Targeting Android 4 avoids use of the Support Library for back-compatibility, and therefore avoids using FragmentActivity. This isn't as bad as some of the back-compatible action bar hacks, but it is still an unnecessary complication in most cases. N.B. you may still want to use the Support Library for new APIs like PagerAdapter.

3. Tablets are going to increase in importance, and for some apps, tablets are the main target. Center your implementation strategy around tablets as the ideal experience, with multiple fragments on each tablet-size layout that are "unrolled" into sub-activities when running on a handset.

4. If you think the above point implies a unified code-base, yes, it does. Targeting Android 4 and above will simplify your unified code base.

The exception is apps that MUST target every user, and every device in the field. For example, my consultancy had an engagement with a dating site that needed to upgrade their Android app. After weighing the pluses and minuses, the conclusion was that it was better to put in more effort and incur some technical debt to reach every possible user. On the other hand, if you are writing an enterprise app for a green-field deployment, don't even consider supporting old versions.

dannyr6• 13 years ago

Site is back up!

Zigurd4• 13 years ago

Excellent article! I'll link it on G+ and on the Programming Andorid page.

I would add to the list the fact that people buy apps most often when they have just bought a new handset. Supporting old versions is like making a retrofit product. The market is inherently limited and more costly to support.

fruzz• 13 years ago

It's amazing to me that we're saying that a three year old OS is too old to have software written for it. Especially given that a part of the laptop market has metamorphosed into the tablet market.

I guess that's not a problem if you buy new tablets/phones every year, which is what we're moving towards.

dannyr6• 13 years ago

Maybe it will not be the same when Android 4.0 turns 3-years old.

Android 4.0+ is just much more mature than 2.3 in terms of UI and API.

Zigurd4• 13 years ago

Android 4.0+ is just much more mature than 2.3 in terms of UI and API.

Maturity is a very important point. Between 2.3 and 4.0, Android became scale-able across tablets and handsets, with unified APIs enabling a unified code-base.

Compared to that big change, dealing with API differences from Android 4.0 to 4.4 is a relatively small matter, comparable to testing for hardware capabilities (and often tied to hardware capabilities). You can test for the API version on the fly and keep a unified code base.

Zigurd4• 13 years ago

Most people buy apps when their device is new-ish. Three year old phones are fine. Five year old phones are fine. But you are not going to sell the users of these devices an app that you started writing today. And you won't lose customers if you stop upgrading them, either.

soapdog• 13 years ago

Just remember that in some countries Android 4.0 is yet to be the norm...

Why it’s time to support only Android 4.0 and above

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