[Ohrrpgce] move minimum android to 2.3 ?

[Ralph Versteegen]

On 9 March 2017 at 07:53, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:

> tmc, I noticed in the Compiling for Android wiki page, you mention the
> ndk-r12b branch. which raises the miminum supported version of Android to
> 2.3
>
> I was playing around with Android Studio today, and I saw that when
> creating a new project, and choosing what version to target, they give you
> a handy estimate of what percentage of all devices would be compatible.
>
> Tutorials I looked at mostly seemed to suggest API 15 for a minimum
> Android version of 4.03 since that provides a lot of features, and supports
> 97.4% of all android devices.
>
> I then when to check out older versions. API 9 for a minimum version of
> 2.3 claims 100% device support.
>
> So either they have just chosen to stop acknowledging the existence of
> versions 2.2 and older, or those older versions actually do represent <
> 0.1% of Android devices out there.
>
> Should we bump our minimum up to android 2.3?
>

Are there any particular features in API 9 that you want to use?

I would have switched to API 9 a while ago, because it was a major
improvement in the quality of libc and other NDK stuff, but my own phone is
Android 2.2. But one of these days I'll spend $20 and get a better phone...

I noticed looking at this that there is a huge difference in usage of 2.2
and 2.3:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Android_historical_version_distribution_-_vector.svg

Though I do wonder whether those stats are heavily biased towards usage in
US/UK/EU. This is the best I could find comparing regional Android OS
versions:
http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/58828/are-there-any-stats-of-android-version-distribution-by-region

And here are some actual stats for Android < 4.0:
https://deviceatlas.com/device-data/explorer/webusage-by-country/traffic/no-tablet/country/ph/type/os_name_version
For example Android 2.3 usage is still the 7th most common Android version
in the Phillipines, with 1.3% share.
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