Android versions History article

[ssfc72]

A nice article on the history of all the version of Android.
https://www.techradar.com/news/android-through-the-ages-the-history-of-googles-smartphone-os

My Huawei phone, that I still use, has the very old Android 4.3.  The phone still works great!

[Jason]

Cool article. It has some tips on features that I didn't know existed or how to access them like rapid task switching with double-tapping the apps (square looking button) at the bottom.


As for your old phone, in the course I'm doing, they recommend developing to target sdk 16 (Android 4.1). At the time, that meant writing your app for it would result in it able to run on about 97% of android devices. Now it's almost 100%. So I upped the target sdk to 18 which is Android 4.3, just what you're using, doing that means apps I write will run on 95.9% of devices, not a bad version to target for.

If you want to make money writing apps, I personally feel I need to write apps that will cover 90%+ of devices. Just for fun, here's how it breaks down for other versions. Note that this is cumulative percentage so  the 95.9% I mentioned above doesn't mean 95.9% of the devices out there are using Android 4.3 - it means that 95.9% are using devices that have Android 4.3 or better.

Forget to mention that these are stats collected from Google Play. So when you go to install an app from Google Play, your device tells it the OS version its using.

My only concern with using old versions of android has to do with security but if you're very careful about the apps you install, you should be fine. And honestly, if your phone is more than 3 years old (maybe even 1 or 2), it's probably not being updated with security fixes even if it's using a newer version of Android. This seems to be where the manufacturers can differ quite a bit, in providing regular updates to their devices and for how long.