sigh, look again: you have mixed up "target" with "min" :/. This is a critical distinction that you can't just gloss over: you simply are NOT forced to use new

sigh, look again: you have mixed up "target" with "min" :/. This is a critical distinction that you can't just gloss over: you simply are NOT forced to use new APIs just because you bumped the target... at build time it might activate the ability to choose to use some new APIs if you want to, but the biggest effect it has is at runtime to affect the various subtle--and extremely limited--backwards compatibility behaviors I mentioned (similar to how iOS uses the version of UIKit you linked your app against) which tend to mostly limit specific scenarios where security issues or bugs were found in older designs. FWIW, I am seriously the build engineer for an Android app distributed in the Play Store (and have maintained apps for Android since the platform launched and it was still called the Android Market), and I'm telling you: you are not just wrong, you are being loudly wrong... not just about this (where the wrongness frankly feels egregious at this point), but your entire point: I have taught classes at the university level on how to rapidly pick up programming environments, and the lead UI developer I hired for our company had almost no experience in the toolkit we are using before we hired him and he's doing fine with it.