[Ohrrpgce] move minimum android to 2.3 ?

[Ralph Versteegen]

On 9 March 2017 at 16:35, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 4:28 PM, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> 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?
>>
>
> Not really. I know that 2.3 is the minimum for targeting intel as opposed
> to arm, right?
>
> But the arm based apks work perfectly well on intel tablets, so I don't
> care that much.
>

Ah yes, 2.3 is the minimum for x86.

You can upload multiple .apks targeting different CPU types and
simultaneously different API levels.
https://developer.android.com/google/play/publishing/multiple-apks.html

A slightly tricky part seems to be assigning version codes to the apks.
Those targetting higher API levels must have higher version numbers, but
you also need the version numbers to increase when you update the app.
https://developer.android.com/training/multiple-apks/api.
html#AdjustManifests

Clearly, creating and uploading multiple .apks creates extra work. I had
assumed that we would want to do that anyway if providing binaries for
multiple cpu types, to reduce the download size and app size. The size of
the ARM liibraries for ohrrpgce-game is currently roughly 1.7MB zipped, 3MB
unzipped. I don't know if that matters to most people. Once I am no longer
using such an old phone with only 170MB of storage it'll probably stop
mattering to me!


>
>
>> 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...
>>
>
> Well, no rush :)
>
>
>
>
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