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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

I build Android apps for a living. Let me tell you, the majority of users are on "outdated" OS versions. You have to support 5-7 years of Android releases to cover a substantial part of the Android user base. The app I'm currently working on requires a minimum version of 6.0 — this came out in 2015. I still test my apps on a Nexus 5.

Many people would buy a phone that will never receive a single update. The software it came with is the only software it'll ever run. And they're fine with that. They see software updates as an annoyance and I fully understand them.

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Tell your management that usage of v6.0 is as good as gone, and you are wasting resources in doing any work to keep support for it: https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobi...

I you look at that data then you can see that the oldest version with any significant usage is v8.1. But even that is quite low, and you might do quite well in not supporting anything older than v9.0.

> Tell your management that usage of v6.0 is as good as gone, and you are wasting resources in doing any work to keep support for it

How do you say this without any knowledge whatsoever about the type of app they work on, or their target audience? v6.0 alone is almost 2% of users based on that chart. In fact if you include everything before v8.1, you seem to get something like 8% of users. What if their app, say, provides the poorest people access to public transportation? Would you really just drop 8% of people on the floor in any scenario?

Exactly this. Even if your demographic is the same as the chart, dropping 2% of users can be the difference between profit and destruction. Maybe it's margins that you'll save but keeping those users, possibly bad reviews, maybe market share over a competitor, there's plenty of reasons supporting older versions is not a definitive "waste."

Is it a pain to support old SDKs? Yep. But that doesn't make it inherently a waste of time to do so.

You have to weigh in the quality improvement of the app that you can provide by not limiting yourself to old apis, and also the resources that you can spend on improvement now that you aren't spending as much effort doing support for old versions.

What is the demographic of people who visit sites that have statscounter tacked on? It doesn't feel like it's representative at all.

What management? I decide this kind of thing myself in that project. The app is open-source and for a nonprofit. I don't see much reasoning to drop Android versions above 6.0 because there aren't that many API changes that would make a difference for my case. It's not like supporting 4.x or 2.x, the "you gotta carry the reimplementation of a substantial part of the UI framework with your app" kind of annoyance. The app in question doesn't even use appcompat. The apk is around 3 megabytes.

Well then it doesn't sound like supporting v.6.0 is much of an issue for you in your particular case. I'm happy for you.

Actually, 7 and 8 added some major support for Java 8, which is quite useful, as it adds better support for NIO and lambdas.

But most of that can be done with polyfills and transpilers, which the android gradle plugin does automatically nowadays.

This. My Mum uses an Android 10 device. No security updates since 2021.

But the apps still work and get updated and that for her and most people is enough.

It's not ideal and as she is not tech-literate, the day might come where she clicks on something which exploits an unpatched vuln :/

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