Ask HN: would you choose android 4.0 as the target for your next big project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: would you choose android 4.0 as the target for your next big project?

5 pointsaw4y4 comments

Imagine having a long term project (4 to 6 months). Would you choose to develop it using Android 4.0 as target? Pros & Cons

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Depends how much you care about reach and what type of app you are building. For most apps it's probably advisable to use at least Android 2.3, or even 2.2 if your app doesn't depend too much on API's from 2.3, which I don't think added that many new and important API's, except for games.

If you want to build a bleeding edge, highly polished app or game that can take advantage of the latest Android API's, and turn that into important features of your app, it's probably alright to go just with Android 4.0. If you do it like this, make sure to take advantage of the "fragments" in Android 4.0, to make the app look good on tablets, too.

Depends on your target audience, I haven't done any research, but I'd guess you should aim at Android 2 or several versions back (from now) of Cynagenmod. You just can't expect even a considerable minority to have it by then (if it was on two top selling phones in Q1/Q2, what market share would you expect those two phones to have?)

I think what I would do is take a look at the Android compatibility library so that you can use ICS 4 APIs in older versions of Android. That way you can use things like Fragments on Android 2.x phones that will never get updated to ICS.

if I ship in 6 months then I would set my minSdkVersion to 8 (Froyo), and targetSdkVersion to 14 (ICS).

One of the cool things about Android is that you can target so many devices. So I see no good reasons not to support the version that runs on most of the devices out there.

http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...

In any case I recommend to set the targetSdkVersion to level 11 or higher. Otherwise, your app won't have the holo theme or Actionbar if it's running on honeycomb or above.

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