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It's interesting to see that Google takes this so seriously they're backporting it to Android 6. I guess they probably have metrics on what Android versions are

It's interesting to see that Google takes this so seriously they're backporting it to Android 6. I guess they probably have metrics on what Android versions are still in active use, but I'm a little surprised that Android 6.0 would still be used heavily enough to warrant the backport. Regardless, it's good to see this sort of industry cooperation from companies who would normally be at each other's throats.

tantalor 2y ago
Supporting Android 6 would be like supporting iOS 9. Apple is only supporting latest version of iOS (17.5).
- runjake 2y ago
  > Supporting Android 6 would be like supporting iOS 9. 1. Your point still stands, but this is because this update is probably shipping as a Google Play Framework update, which works on >= 6.0. Google is not (to my knowledge) releasing a new firmware. Apple would do well to decouple certain software components from iOS, IMHO. 2. In case others are curious about iOS version market share, statcounter's stats for April 2024: 17.4 (current until today): 51% 17.3: 22% 16.6: 4.3% 16.7: 3.18% 16.1: 2.8% 16.3: 2.12% https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/ios/mobile-tablet/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/ios/mobil...
  - tjoff 2y ago
    Android 6: 0.79%
  - tadfisher 2y ago
    As a developer, that long tail of folks on the previous major version really sucks with fast-moving frameworks like SwiftUI. There's no way my company (a banking app) would drop 10% of customers, so we typically do N-1 for iOS support. Our Android app shipped almost 3 years ago with minSdk=24 (Android 6.0) and we haven't had to update it.
    - afavour 2y ago
      The web browser is a big issue with this, too. A Safari release broke IndexedDB and they didn’t release a fix for over two months because browser updates are tied to the OS.
      - bzzzt 2y ago
        If there's a critical security update they can release an update within days. So it's got nothing to do with the complexity of releasing a new OS, it's just that they found IndexedDB not important enough to warrant an out of cycle update.
    - ilinx 2y ago
      I write apps for a large regional grocery store chain, and we have to support N-2. Even then we get support emails every time we bump it up.
      - flutas 2y ago
        I work on Android apps for a food company turned media network. We, to this day...with no talks of changing it any time soon, support all the way back to Android 5.0 (released in November on 2014).
        Const-me 2y ago
        I mostly work on Windows apps. People still complain when software drops support of Windows 7 released in 2009, or Windows 8 released in 2012. Despite none of them are supported by Microsoft.
        mschuster91 2y ago
        It'd be a more fair comparison to take into account Windows 7's EOL which was just a year ago IIRC if you coughed up Extended Support money, its broad install base, and it being the last actually truly decent Windows that had a consistent UI across the place and no ads.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    So this has the downside of not being supported for Androids that don’t use Google Play services right? Like the Amazon tablets? Still a big win overall I’m just curious what number of devices basically don’t get important upgrades due to this method. (Surely a tiny amount compared to what you’d have if you relied on device manufacturers to update the OS.)
  - kelnos 2y ago
    > Apple would do well to decouple certain software components from iOS I'm not really convinced of this. When you control the entire hardware and software stack, and already provide updates for 7+(?) years per model, would doing this really change much? Google needed to do that because some cheapo manufacturers weren't really providing any updates to speak of, and Google has limited ability to force manufacturers to provide updates on any particular schedule. It's funny, because to me this is really just the Linux model vs. BSD model, in a way. Linux base systems are cobbled together from various bits of software maintained by different people and groups. Many of those components can be updated independently of one another, including the kernel. The BSD model is to ship the entire base system as a versioned unit, and only update the entire thing monolithically. Android does the Linux model, iOS does the BSD model. Both models work just fine, depending on what your goals are and your distribution model. I think the one thing I'd argue Apple should decouple from the OS is Safari. A web browser (and the underlying OS web view) should be independently updateable, even after a device stops getting OS-level security updates.
- hedgehog 2y ago
  Google and Apple have fairly different platform software update strategies so I was curious how the support windows line up. Android 6 was the last supported release on devices like the Nexus 5 and Xperia Z3 from 2013 and 2014. iOS 9 was the last version supported for devices like the iPhone 4s and 3rd gen iPad that shipped in 2011 or 2012. Going forward to 2013 iPhones you have the 5s which was last supported in iOS 12. It sounds like Google is able to ship this directly rather than as an OS update that would need to go through manufacturers, while Apple typically deploys these type of fixes by pushing an OS update. I'm curious how far back they'll go, they rarely ship security fixes more than two major versions behind the current release (so maybe down to iOS 15, supporting devices released in 2015).
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    You’re right iOS 15 got an update earlier this year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_15 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_15
  - GeekyBear 2y ago
    > they rarely ship security fixes more than two major versions Every flagship iPhone since 2011 has gotten at least five years of OS updates, with additional years of security updates after that. For instance, the original version of the iPhone SE is currently in its eighth year of support, and just got another security update a couple of weeks ago.
    - hedgehog 2y ago
      Two different things, Apple provides a pretty long window of OS updates for each device but doesn't ship updates for older OS versions. For example the 1st gen SE shipped with iOS 9 which has not been getting updates for a few years, but it can run iOS 15 which still seems to be getting security updates.
      - GeekyBear 2y ago
        It probably seems odd when you're coming from a history of devices with a very short support window, but you don't need to worry about years when you only get a security update until you run out of years when you get the OS AND security updates first. For instance, that original iPhone SE came out in 2016, the same year as the original Pixel phone. The iPhone is still supported by Apple today, while the Pixel phone was dropped from support by Google five years ago. Google had to come up with a way to backport features to older unsupported versions of the OS because their support window was so abysmally short. Hopefully, this won't be an issue going forward, with Google promising a comparable support window in the future.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  iOS 17.5 supports devices back to the iPhone XS released in 2018. iOS 17 runs on 80% of current iPhones in use https://telemetrydeck.com/blog/ios-market-share-03-24/#:~:text=iOS%2017%3A%2080.9%25%2C%20up%20from%2078.8%25%20in%20February&text=The%20overwhelming%20majority%20of%20iOS,of%20the%20TelemetryDeck%20data%20set https://telemetrydeck.com/blog/ios-market-share-03-24/#:~:te....
treve 2y ago
10 years support seems pretty reasonable to me for a major operating system version, regardless of usage numbers.
- imwillofficial 2y ago
  It would be nice, but I wouldn't call it reasonable. That's a LOOOOONG time.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    Isn't 10 years pretty standard for windows OS versions?
    - luyu_wu 2y ago
      And 20 years for Linux :P MacOS and iOS really are the major outliers that convince people otherwise here.
      - jmb99 2y ago
        Unless I missed a memo, Linux LTS is 2 years of support these days. Many distributions offer 10 year LTS releases, but I’m not sure of any off the top of my head that currently offer more.
        luyu_wu 2y ago
        My point was more so that you can upgrade 20 year old devices to Linux 6.X! You're correct though.
        kelnos 2y ago
        I feel like a couple things were mixed that aren't the same. The commenter upthread said 10 years for Windows OS versions. I took that to mean e.g. "Windows 11 will be supported for 10 years from initial release". Sure, you can often install a modern Linux distro on a 20-year-old device (though just as often, you cannot), but that's not the same thing as a single version of Windows being supported for 10 years. The analogous situation is indeed LTS versions of Linux distros, which certainly don't have 10-year support lifetimes, let alone 20. But the support lifetimes make sense for the various vendors. Apple doesn't need to support a particular major version of macOS or iOS for all that long, because they make sure new versions of their OSes will run on fairly old devices (all of which are devices they've built, and have full control over), and they aggressively push people to upgrade to new major versions as they come out. Microsoft has a lot of customers who value stability and consistency above all else, and on top of that, they have to support a wide variety of hardware that they don't and can't control. Supporting a major version of Windows for many years makes sense for them. As for Linux, there's no one single source, so a rolling-release distro can decide to only support the bleeding edge, whereas a cloud provider might roll their own distro for server use and decide to support that for a decade, if they think that's what their customers want.
tmpz22 2y ago
> Google takes this so seriously they're backporting it to Android 6 Or for contractual reasons, or for some technical reason it was easy enough to be "why not"
- xarope 2y ago
  Or they are pursuing a gov related project, and this was mentioned as a showstopper...
seanalltogether 2y ago
Google made a deliberate decision long ago to detach library and feature support from the operating system due to manufacturer fragmentation. So most of their new stuff automatically works with old versions of android
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Same for security updates. A lot of new features and security patches get updated via the Google Play Services to older versions of Android as well.
  - _rdvw 2y ago
    Google Play System updates provide very few security patches and this only applies to devices with Android 10 and higher and most APEX modules are only updatable in later versions. I track security patch counts of monthly Android Security Bulletin vs available APEX vs my aftermarket backports for A7 through A13 here: https://divestos.org/pages/patch_counts#aggregatePatchCounts https://divestos.org/pages/patch_counts#aggregatePatchCounts
    - microtonal 2y ago
      And the annoying thing is that on some phones (like Samsung phones recently, twice), the Play System updates get blocked for months on end. Worse, people who buy a new device are often stuck on ancient versions. I recently tried an Android phone again for a few months, and the update/security situation is still a mess. E.g. Samsung does monthly updates on more premium phones. But a former flagship like the S22 would sometimes only get the update near the end of the month, even before the S24 is out. Having a phone with known CVEs for the better part of a month is… meh. For some vendors, like Samsung, things are much better than a decade ago, but it’s still a far cry from Apple rolling out updates to all models simultaneously.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        >Having a phone with known CVEs for the better part of a month is… meh. Out of curiosity , have you ever encountered any malware that exploits said CVEs? If a month delay would be so dangerous, Android users, even of new devices would be getting pwned left and right, let alone Android users of device no longer getting patches. Source: Android user of old phone who hasn't been hacked yet so I'm not sure where exactly the dangers are, as the attack surface is mostly the web browser and the apps, both of which are scanned and covered by up-to-date patches from Google Play Store/Services even on my ageing phone. So as long as you don't browse extremely dodgy websites, and don't download shady apps you should be good as nothing else can't get to the Kernel CVEs on your unpatched phone. Yeah, I'm sure some crafty malware dev can whip out a targeted virus that can exploit the chain of open CVEs on my particular phone through a MMS message or something, but I'm not sure targeting the 100 or so users left still using this old OnePlus model that's worth less than 20 Euros used (pointing to a user without much income), is a good use of their skills and time, when they could be frying much bigger fish with that know-how like going after Microsoft's Azure or something. Nor am I being targeted by state actors who have these means. And if you are being targeted by state actors, they have access Zero-Days that even Apple or Google haven't patched yet so you're not safe anyway no matter what phone you have.
toast0 2y ago
FWIW, WhatsApp claims support back to Android 5.0, and if they haven't changed their support decisions since I left, that means there's a significant amount of users in the wild on Android 5.0. I'm not surprised Google only goes back to Android 6, they were always dropping versions from support before WA did; their threshold must be higher.
- flutas 2y ago
  Yep, my company would lose a significant amount of our users if we updated from Android 5.0. A lot of the early Fire TV devices are still out there running Android 5.0, and they are actively used.
- beAbU 2y ago
  WhatsApp majority userbase sits outside of the US, and it's deeply embedded in many 3rd world countries. I'm not sure how their European userbase compares with the African/Asian userbase. I reckon the WhatsApp userbase OS distribution skews much more to older android versions compared to an app that mostly enjoys US/1st world country userbase.
  - toast0 2y ago
    Certainly, the WhatsApp userbase is skewed. But most of WhatsApp Android users are also Google Play Android users (certainly not all, WhatsApp publishes the apk directly), so if WhatsApp doesn't want to cut off X million users on Android 5, but Google is ok with not supporting it, Google almost certainly has a higher threshold value required to keep support. I'd guess the Android 5 users with Google Play and not WhatsApp outnumbers the Android 5 users with WhatsApp and not Google Play, but none of those statistics are public. With the number of Android devices out there, it really makes more sense to think about it in actual user/device count rather than percentages.
zadokshi 2y ago
They are taking it seriously because of the legal liability issues. Their lawyers are clearly worried about the legal implications of their devices being used to track people and things for illegal purposes and want to make sure they have a level of protection against lawsuits from consequences of tracking devices used for illegal purposes. There are already cases of women being stalked using these devices.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  > Their lawyers are clearly worried about the legal implications of their devices being used to track people and things for illegal purposes Just that Android devices are not involved in tracking of AirTags, as of today only iOS devices actually share the location of AirTags back to Apple. They maybe want to change that, but considering the huge amount of volume disparity between AirTags and Google's tags, I assume Apple would have to pay Google for the service of extending their tracking-network...
lawgimenez 2y ago
Here in Asia, people are still on the older Android versions. So maybe try switching the filter on the website besides US.
- mattl 2y ago
  Where in Asia? Does it vary much by country?
  - lawgimenez 2y ago
    Philippines, I am not sure how accurate the link is below but it is almost certainly possible people are moslty on older devices. https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-versions-by-country#ph https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-versions-by-country#p...
    - ferongr 2y ago
      This is a 2019 article with figures from that time. So it's wildly out of date.
kyrra 2y ago
This is powered by Google Play Services (aka: gmscore). https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/9037938?hl=en https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/9037938?hl=en
josefx 2y ago
I just recently pulled out an old phone that originally ran Android 6 for a project, hardware wise it still runs perfectly. The only thing wrong with it is that I can't upgrade it to a newer Android version.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
From what I understand, backporting won't make a difference, unless vendors integrate it into their custom OS installs, and, from what I hear, they aren't really giving legacy support much love.

tantalor 2y ago

Supporting Android 6 would be like supporting iOS 9. Apple is only supporting latest version of iOS (17.5).

runjake 2y ago
> Supporting Android 6 would be like supporting iOS 9. 1. Your point still stands, but this is because this update is probably shipping as a Google Play Framework update, which works on >= 6.0. Google is not (to my knowledge) releasing a new firmware. Apple would do well to decouple certain software components from iOS, IMHO. 2. In case others are curious about iOS version market share, statcounter's stats for April 2024: 17.4 (current until today): 51% 17.3: 22% 16.6: 4.3% 16.7: 3.18% 16.1: 2.8% 16.3: 2.12% https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/ios/mobile-tablet/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/ios/mobil...
- tjoff 2y ago
  Android 6: 0.79%
- tadfisher 2y ago
  As a developer, that long tail of folks on the previous major version really sucks with fast-moving frameworks like SwiftUI. There's no way my company (a banking app) would drop 10% of customers, so we typically do N-1 for iOS support. Our Android app shipped almost 3 years ago with minSdk=24 (Android 6.0) and we haven't had to update it.
  - afavour 2y ago
    The web browser is a big issue with this, too. A Safari release broke IndexedDB and they didn’t release a fix for over two months because browser updates are tied to the OS.
    - bzzzt 2y ago
      If there's a critical security update they can release an update within days. So it's got nothing to do with the complexity of releasing a new OS, it's just that they found IndexedDB not important enough to warrant an out of cycle update.
  - ilinx 2y ago
    I write apps for a large regional grocery store chain, and we have to support N-2. Even then we get support emails every time we bump it up.
    - flutas 2y ago
      I work on Android apps for a food company turned media network. We, to this day...with no talks of changing it any time soon, support all the way back to Android 5.0 (released in November on 2014).
      - Const-me 2y ago
        I mostly work on Windows apps. People still complain when software drops support of Windows 7 released in 2009, or Windows 8 released in 2012. Despite none of them are supported by Microsoft.
        mschuster91 2y ago
        It'd be a more fair comparison to take into account Windows 7's EOL which was just a year ago IIRC if you coughed up Extended Support money, its broad install base, and it being the last actually truly decent Windows that had a consistent UI across the place and no ads.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  So this has the downside of not being supported for Androids that don’t use Google Play services right? Like the Amazon tablets? Still a big win overall I’m just curious what number of devices basically don’t get important upgrades due to this method. (Surely a tiny amount compared to what you’d have if you relied on device manufacturers to update the OS.)
- kelnos 2y ago
  > Apple would do well to decouple certain software components from iOS I'm not really convinced of this. When you control the entire hardware and software stack, and already provide updates for 7+(?) years per model, would doing this really change much? Google needed to do that because some cheapo manufacturers weren't really providing any updates to speak of, and Google has limited ability to force manufacturers to provide updates on any particular schedule. It's funny, because to me this is really just the Linux model vs. BSD model, in a way. Linux base systems are cobbled together from various bits of software maintained by different people and groups. Many of those components can be updated independently of one another, including the kernel. The BSD model is to ship the entire base system as a versioned unit, and only update the entire thing monolithically. Android does the Linux model, iOS does the BSD model. Both models work just fine, depending on what your goals are and your distribution model. I think the one thing I'd argue Apple should decouple from the OS is Safari. A web browser (and the underlying OS web view) should be independently updateable, even after a device stops getting OS-level security updates.
hedgehog 2y ago
Google and Apple have fairly different platform software update strategies so I was curious how the support windows line up. Android 6 was the last supported release on devices like the Nexus 5 and Xperia Z3 from 2013 and 2014. iOS 9 was the last version supported for devices like the iPhone 4s and 3rd gen iPad that shipped in 2011 or 2012. Going forward to 2013 iPhones you have the 5s which was last supported in iOS 12. It sounds like Google is able to ship this directly rather than as an OS update that would need to go through manufacturers, while Apple typically deploys these type of fixes by pushing an OS update. I'm curious how far back they'll go, they rarely ship security fixes more than two major versions behind the current release (so maybe down to iOS 15, supporting devices released in 2015).
- scarface_74 2y ago
  You’re right iOS 15 got an update earlier this year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_15 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_15
- GeekyBear 2y ago
  > they rarely ship security fixes more than two major versions Every flagship iPhone since 2011 has gotten at least five years of OS updates, with additional years of security updates after that. For instance, the original version of the iPhone SE is currently in its eighth year of support, and just got another security update a couple of weeks ago.
  - hedgehog 2y ago
    Two different things, Apple provides a pretty long window of OS updates for each device but doesn't ship updates for older OS versions. For example the 1st gen SE shipped with iOS 9 which has not been getting updates for a few years, but it can run iOS 15 which still seems to be getting security updates.
    - GeekyBear 2y ago
      It probably seems odd when you're coming from a history of devices with a very short support window, but you don't need to worry about years when you only get a security update until you run out of years when you get the OS AND security updates first. For instance, that original iPhone SE came out in 2016, the same year as the original Pixel phone. The iPhone is still supported by Apple today, while the Pixel phone was dropped from support by Google five years ago. Google had to come up with a way to backport features to older unsupported versions of the OS because their support window was so abysmally short. Hopefully, this won't be an issue going forward, with Google promising a comparable support window in the future.
scarface_74 2y ago
iOS 17.5 supports devices back to the iPhone XS released in 2018. iOS 17 runs on 80% of current iPhones in use https://telemetrydeck.com/blog/ios-market-share-03-24/#:~:text=iOS%2017%3A%2080.9%25%2C%20up%20from%2078.8%25%20in%20February&text=The%20overwhelming%20majority%20of%20iOS,of%20the%20TelemetryDeck%20data%20set https://telemetrydeck.com/blog/ios-market-share-03-24/#:~:te....

treve 2y ago

10 years support seems pretty reasonable to me for a major operating system version, regardless of usage numbers.

imwillofficial 2y ago
It would be nice, but I wouldn't call it reasonable. That's a LOOOOONG time.
- nemomarx 2y ago
  Isn't 10 years pretty standard for windows OS versions?
  - luyu_wu 2y ago
    And 20 years for Linux :P MacOS and iOS really are the major outliers that convince people otherwise here.
    - jmb99 2y ago
      Unless I missed a memo, Linux LTS is 2 years of support these days. Many distributions offer 10 year LTS releases, but I’m not sure of any off the top of my head that currently offer more.
      - luyu_wu 2y ago
        My point was more so that you can upgrade 20 year old devices to Linux 6.X! You're correct though.
        kelnos 2y ago
        I feel like a couple things were mixed that aren't the same. The commenter upthread said 10 years for Windows OS versions. I took that to mean e.g. "Windows 11 will be supported for 10 years from initial release". Sure, you can often install a modern Linux distro on a 20-year-old device (though just as often, you cannot), but that's not the same thing as a single version of Windows being supported for 10 years. The analogous situation is indeed LTS versions of Linux distros, which certainly don't have 10-year support lifetimes, let alone 20. But the support lifetimes make sense for the various vendors. Apple doesn't need to support a particular major version of macOS or iOS for all that long, because they make sure new versions of their OSes will run on fairly old devices (all of which are devices they've built, and have full control over), and they aggressively push people to upgrade to new major versions as they come out. Microsoft has a lot of customers who value stability and consistency above all else, and on top of that, they have to support a wide variety of hardware that they don't and can't control. Supporting a major version of Windows for many years makes sense for them. As for Linux, there's no one single source, so a rolling-release distro can decide to only support the bleeding edge, whereas a cloud provider might roll their own distro for server use and decide to support that for a decade, if they think that's what their customers want.

tmpz22 2y ago

> Google takes this so seriously they're backporting it to Android 6 Or for contractual reasons, or for some technical reason it was easy enough to be "why not"

xarope 2y ago
Or they are pursuing a gov related project, and this was mentioned as a showstopper...

seanalltogether 2y ago

Google made a deliberate decision long ago to detach library and feature support from the operating system due to manufacturer fragmentation. So most of their new stuff automatically works with old versions of android

Rinzler89 2y ago
Same for security updates. A lot of new features and security patches get updated via the Google Play Services to older versions of Android as well.
- _rdvw 2y ago
  Google Play System updates provide very few security patches and this only applies to devices with Android 10 and higher and most APEX modules are only updatable in later versions. I track security patch counts of monthly Android Security Bulletin vs available APEX vs my aftermarket backports for A7 through A13 here: https://divestos.org/pages/patch_counts#aggregatePatchCounts https://divestos.org/pages/patch_counts#aggregatePatchCounts
  - microtonal 2y ago
    And the annoying thing is that on some phones (like Samsung phones recently, twice), the Play System updates get blocked for months on end. Worse, people who buy a new device are often stuck on ancient versions. I recently tried an Android phone again for a few months, and the update/security situation is still a mess. E.g. Samsung does monthly updates on more premium phones. But a former flagship like the S22 would sometimes only get the update near the end of the month, even before the S24 is out. Having a phone with known CVEs for the better part of a month is… meh. For some vendors, like Samsung, things are much better than a decade ago, but it’s still a far cry from Apple rolling out updates to all models simultaneously.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >Having a phone with known CVEs for the better part of a month is… meh. Out of curiosity , have you ever encountered any malware that exploits said CVEs? If a month delay would be so dangerous, Android users, even of new devices would be getting pwned left and right, let alone Android users of device no longer getting patches. Source: Android user of old phone who hasn't been hacked yet so I'm not sure where exactly the dangers are, as the attack surface is mostly the web browser and the apps, both of which are scanned and covered by up-to-date patches from Google Play Store/Services even on my ageing phone. So as long as you don't browse extremely dodgy websites, and don't download shady apps you should be good as nothing else can't get to the Kernel CVEs on your unpatched phone. Yeah, I'm sure some crafty malware dev can whip out a targeted virus that can exploit the chain of open CVEs on my particular phone through a MMS message or something, but I'm not sure targeting the 100 or so users left still using this old OnePlus model that's worth less than 20 Euros used (pointing to a user without much income), is a good use of their skills and time, when they could be frying much bigger fish with that know-how like going after Microsoft's Azure or something. Nor am I being targeted by state actors who have these means. And if you are being targeted by state actors, they have access Zero-Days that even Apple or Google haven't patched yet so you're not safe anyway no matter what phone you have.

toast0 2y ago

FWIW, WhatsApp claims support back to Android 5.0, and if they haven't changed their support decisions since I left, that means there's a significant amount of users in the wild on Android 5.0. I'm not surprised Google only goes back to Android 6, they were always dropping versions from support before WA did; their threshold must be higher.

flutas 2y ago
Yep, my company would lose a significant amount of our users if we updated from Android 5.0. A lot of the early Fire TV devices are still out there running Android 5.0, and they are actively used.
beAbU 2y ago
WhatsApp majority userbase sits outside of the US, and it's deeply embedded in many 3rd world countries. I'm not sure how their European userbase compares with the African/Asian userbase. I reckon the WhatsApp userbase OS distribution skews much more to older android versions compared to an app that mostly enjoys US/1st world country userbase.
- toast0 2y ago
  Certainly, the WhatsApp userbase is skewed. But most of WhatsApp Android users are also Google Play Android users (certainly not all, WhatsApp publishes the apk directly), so if WhatsApp doesn't want to cut off X million users on Android 5, but Google is ok with not supporting it, Google almost certainly has a higher threshold value required to keep support. I'd guess the Android 5 users with Google Play and not WhatsApp outnumbers the Android 5 users with WhatsApp and not Google Play, but none of those statistics are public. With the number of Android devices out there, it really makes more sense to think about it in actual user/device count rather than percentages.

zadokshi 2y ago

They are taking it seriously because of the legal liability issues. Their lawyers are clearly worried about the legal implications of their devices being used to track people and things for illegal purposes and want to make sure they have a level of protection against lawsuits from consequences of tracking devices used for illegal purposes. There are already cases of women being stalked using these devices.

rickdeckard 2y ago
> Their lawyers are clearly worried about the legal implications of their devices being used to track people and things for illegal purposes Just that Android devices are not involved in tracking of AirTags, as of today only iOS devices actually share the location of AirTags back to Apple. They maybe want to change that, but considering the huge amount of volume disparity between AirTags and Google's tags, I assume Apple would have to pay Google for the service of extending their tracking-network...

lawgimenez 2y ago

Here in Asia, people are still on the older Android versions. So maybe try switching the filter on the website besides US.

mattl 2y ago
Where in Asia? Does it vary much by country?
- lawgimenez 2y ago
  Philippines, I am not sure how accurate the link is below but it is almost certainly possible people are moslty on older devices. https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-versions-by-country#ph https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-versions-by-country#p...
  - ferongr 2y ago
    This is a 2019 article with figures from that time. So it's wildly out of date.

kyrra 2y ago

This is powered by Google Play Services (aka: gmscore). https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/9037938?hl=en https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/9037938?hl=en

josefx 2y ago

I just recently pulled out an old phone that originally ran Android 6 for a project, hardware wise it still runs perfectly. The only thing wrong with it is that I can't upgrade it to a newer Android version.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

From what I understand, backporting won't make a difference, unless vendors integrate it into their custom OS installs, and, from what I hear, they aren't really giving legacy support much love.