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> ... run on Vista and up as Microsoft dropped 16-bit compatibility You'd better tell Microsoft about that. They did drop it from the 64 bit versions but not

> ... run on Vista and up as Microsoft dropped 16-bit compatibility You'd better tell Microsoft about that. They did drop it from the 64 bit versions but not the 32 bit versions. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926657 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926657 > What makes you think the Android API breaks backward compatibility? What makes you think I made that claim? I will however make the claim that different Android versions have different bugs and because of that you have to test across all versions. I'm also willing to bet that if you use undocumented APIs and behaviours then you will get bitten on version upgrades - something Microsoft does not do. And sometimes Google do annoying things. They messed around with the handling of configChanges in the manifest encoding it in non-backwards compatible ways. If you use the admob library you get forced into uses-sdk 13 which then changes your app appearance. Here is a comment I made about versions if you want to see my opinion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3637542 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3637542

mrb 15y ago
Re 64-bit: you are correct. But this still proves my point that Microsoft sometimes deliberately breaks backward compatibility. Re bugs across different OS versions: your initial comment implied that, because Microsoft puts so much effort into backward compatibility, that app developers do not have to worry about testing across different Windows versions. This is wrong. Just like on Android, Windows developers generally need to test across different Windows versions for bugs, etc. In other words, my point is that both Microsoft and Google put a similar amount of energy into maintaining backward compatibility. Therefore, Android development presents a similar challenge to Windows development to developers who care about compatibility. And in both cases, the challenge is not that huge... Case in point: the vast majority of apps written for Android 1.5 will run just fine on 4.0 --this trumps all arguments!

mrb 15y ago

Re 64-bit: you are correct. But this still proves my point that Microsoft sometimes deliberately breaks backward compatibility. Re bugs across different OS versions: your initial comment implied that, because Microsoft puts so much effort into backward compatibility, that app developers do not have to worry about testing across different Windows versions. This is wrong. Just like on Android, Windows developers generally need to test across different Windows versions for bugs, etc. In other words, my point is that both Microsoft and Google put a similar amount of energy into maintaining backward compatibility. Therefore, Android development presents a similar challenge to Windows development to developers who care about compatibility. And in both cases, the challenge is not that huge... Case in point: the vast majority of apps written for Android 1.5 will run just fine on 4.0 --this trumps all arguments!