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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Since about 12 or so, it's been a series of cosmetic changes, bugfixes, and "AI" features.

Android 17 is required for full Android security updates. Only a subset of patches are backported to older versions and that's decreasing. Android 17 is also required for the latest and greatest privacy/security protections which are not backported. There have been massive privacy and security improvements in each yearly Android release. There have also been far more improvements than those. Being unaware of it doesn't mean it hasn't been done.

This is largely untrue.

You would be missing out on:

- Minimum Target SDK Enforcement Blocks installation of apps that target ancient versions of Android and legacy APIs.

- Restricted settings for sideloaded apps

- Null-Cipher rejection and 2G disabling

- Cell Network Surveillence Alerts

- Platform Rust Migration

- Scoped Media

Among many many unpatched Med and Low severity CVEs that don't get backported.

> Minimum Target SDK Enforcement Blocks installation of apps that target ancient versions of Android and legacy APIs.

Funny to list a user-hostile change as the first “improvement” that comes to mind.

I guess GP should have said “series of cosmetic changes, and breaks in your UI habbits and a few of your apps deemed too old”.

Minimum Target SDK is the opposite of user hostile. Privacy and security changes are added to the SDK consistently. Apps that fail to comply with that SDK are much more of a privacy risk.

Feel free to look at the AOSP SDK changes for each major version that's released and you will see many of these examples.

Apps that failed to keep up with these changes, regardless of licensing, should be avoided and ultimately removed from availability.

The deprecation of 32-bit apps is another example of this.

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