4 ms·

There hasn't really been a major issue with app compatibility since 2.3. Even so, all but 2.3% of android phones are running 4.x or above. http://www.statista.

• zanny 10y ago
  If you are stuck targeting Android API version 14 forever, that is a problem. It means Google can never introduce anything new that people can actually use without alienating a portion of the userbase. Albeit, that was also a perceived huge issue four years ago with 2.3 and version 9, and today all those 2.3 devices are mostly gone. But in the same way the mhz race was a limited time thing, and after that personal computer sales slowed drastically because the year over year improvements have been much more minute, Google cannot just assume that the planned obsolesce of contract phones will force users to change hardware to keep pace with the OS. A lot of the 4.x era Android devices will be "good enough" for many people in the same way Core 2 was "good enough" for most casual PC users. And we have seen the fallout of that. Users do not care if their Windows XP is catastrophically insecure when no longer updated, they keep using it until disaster strikes. And the same is bound to happen to all these Android phones that stop getting updates. I don't think I've ever seen greater technical debt than the accumulated mess of Android device drivers and the OEM habit of forking the kernel and violating the GPL to stick proprietary blobs in and then freeze the kernel, which means every device is on a forced obsolescence cycle whenever their kernel can no longer work with the latest Android requirements.