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Why does this matter? What apis are you using that are not available in Lollipop, which has 88%+ market share. Also, those dashboards are misleading. For the N

by spbaar 8y ago

Why does this matter? What apis are you using that are not available in Lollipop, which has 88%+ market share. Also, those dashboards are misleading. For the North American market the proportion of older phones is less than half of what the dashboard displays

izacus 8y ago
For any kind of app targeting westen world (meaning - it's not localised into Hindi, African and Chinese languages), the market share of Lollipop will be below 20%. According to most app stats I've seen (mine and others), Android 6.0+ is pretty much on 80%+, with Oreo nearing 40% since Samsung started rollouts.
- __sr__ 8y ago
  > For any kind of app targeting westen world (meaning - it's not localised into Hindi, African and Chinese languages), the market share of Lollipop will be below 20%. Where exactly are you getting this data from? Please do not put random numbers without citing sources.
  - pawadu 8y ago
    If you have published apps on Android, the developer console gives you detailed information about YOUR install base. Couldn't care less about someone in Somalia using Android 4.4 when 80% of my users are on Oreo.
  - izacus 8y ago
    It's based on my personal and my company apps. Obviously I can't give you links to our Play Store / Analytics backends. I guess there's an aggregator somewhere?
georgemcbay 8y ago
I'm not the OP, but there are some changes to background execution limits that can have a fairly large impact on older-than-Oreo apps if you build against SDK 26: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background You've been able to avoid dealing with these changes for a while now by simply building against an older SDK, but Google is in the process of restricting the ability to put any app built with an older SDK on the Play Store. I think you already can't list new apps that use an older SDK, and existing apps won't be able to update to new APKs using older SDKs starting in November. FWIW, I understand why they made the changes here, and they are user-positive, and just abandoning Android over them seems like an incredible overreaction, but speaking as someone who has been updating an older app to deal with these changes, there are some real pain-points here if you're bringing forward an older app.
- owl57 8y ago
  > existing apps won't be able to update to new APKs using older SDKs starting in November So, some developers will probably defer handling the changes until November, and then if there is some critical bug (security or otherwise) they won't be able to just fix the bug without also building the rest of the app with the new SDK as is, broken/untested even if it compiles?

by spbaar 8y ago

izacus 8y ago

For any kind of app targeting westen world (meaning - it's not localised into Hindi, African and Chinese languages), the market share of Lollipop will be below 20%. According to most app stats I've seen (mine and others), Android 6.0+ is pretty much on 80%+, with Oreo nearing 40% since Samsung started rollouts.

__sr__ 8y ago
> For any kind of app targeting westen world (meaning - it's not localised into Hindi, African and Chinese languages), the market share of Lollipop will be below 20%. Where exactly are you getting this data from? Please do not put random numbers without citing sources.
- pawadu 8y ago
  If you have published apps on Android, the developer console gives you detailed information about YOUR install base. Couldn't care less about someone in Somalia using Android 4.4 when 80% of my users are on Oreo.
- izacus 8y ago
  It's based on my personal and my company apps. Obviously I can't give you links to our Play Store / Analytics backends. I guess there's an aggregator somewhere?

georgemcbay 8y ago

I'm not the OP, but there are some changes to background execution limits that can have a fairly large impact on older-than-Oreo apps if you build against SDK 26: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background You've been able to avoid dealing with these changes for a while now by simply building against an older SDK, but Google is in the process of restricting the ability to put any app built with an older SDK on the Play Store. I think you already can't list new apps that use an older SDK, and existing apps won't be able to update to new APKs using older SDKs starting in November. FWIW, I understand why they made the changes here, and they are user-positive, and just abandoning Android over them seems like an incredible overreaction, but speaking as someone who has been updating an older app to deal with these changes, there are some real pain-points here if you're bringing forward an older app.

owl57 8y ago
> existing apps won't be able to update to new APKs using older SDKs starting in November So, some developers will probably defer handling the changes until November, and then if there is some critical bug (security or otherwise) they won't be able to just fix the bug without also building the rest of the app with the new SDK as is, broken/untested even if it compiles?