It really depends on what latest-and-greatest features you want for your app. Google (and a few others) have invested a lot of effort in porting back new Androi

It really depends on what latest-and-greatest features you want for your app. Google (and a few others) have invested a lot of effort in porting back new Android features with compatibility libraries (e.g. Fragments) so what you want is covered by them, there's little or no compromise. On the other side, Google has also developed a careful reflection / late-binding framework that often makes it straightforward for apps to gracefully degrade their uses of new APIs. That gives developers another way to take advantage of new features while retaining broad compatibility.