It's not that simple. If it were that simple Android Studio wouldn't show you a big red error when you do that and they wouldn't have built an entire assistant

It's not that simple. If it were that simple Android Studio wouldn't show you a big red error when you do that and they wouldn't have built an entire assistant for the purpose of incrementing a number[0]. The reason is that bumping the targetSdkVersion changes various behavior, sometimes in a breaking manner. A good recent example is that 34 -> 35 will force edgeToEdge rendering on all activities unless you opt-out per-window (and 35 -> 36 removes the opt-out). So simply doing what you said would probably lead to UI elements appearing behind the nav/status bars and the app being unusable (on API 35+ devices, from my understanding). [0] https://developer.android.com/build/sdk-upgrade-assistant https://developer.android.com/build/sdk-upgrade-assistant