I'm giving up on upgrading my apps for Android. The releases are dividing the market every single year and consequently steadily eroding sales. On the one hand Google's Nexus was released 3 years ago and is now obsolete; on the other hand Apple's iPhone 5s was released 5 years ago and gets to run iOS 12. On top of this, the vast majority of my paying customers use iOS, not Android (a variety of lifestyle and referenc…
Why does this matter? What apis are you using that are not available in Lollipop, which has 88%+ market share.
Also, those dashboards are misleading. For the North American market the proportion of older phones is less than half of what the dashboard displays
I really wish they used version numbers rather than names so i can tell there’s a new version of android. I thought this was a just a distro for raspberry pis. It’s pretty clear in the article though, no sweat :)
For app developers, the API level (which is 28 for Android 9.0 / Pie) is significantly more relevant, since it determines API breakages, behaviour changes and backwards compatibility.
I'm giving up on upgrading my apps for Android. The releases are dividing the market every single year and consequently steadily eroding sales. On the one hand Google's Nexus was released 3 years ago and is now obsolete; on the other hand Apple's iPhone 5s was released 5 years ago and gets to run iOS 12. On top of this, the vast majority of my paying customers use iOS, not Android (a variety of lifestyle and referenc…
Why does this matter? What apis are you using that are not available in Lollipop, which has 88%+ market share. Also, those dashboards are misleading. For the North American market the proportion of older phones is less than half of what the dashboard displays
For any kind of app targeting westen world (meaning - it's not localised into Hindi, African and Chinese languages), the market share of Lollipop will be below 20%.
According to most app stats I've seen (mine and others), Android 6.0+ is pretty much on 80%+, with Oreo nearing 40% since Samsung started rollouts.
I'm giving up on upgrading my apps for Android. The releases are dividing the market every single year and consequently steadily eroding sales. On the one hand Google's Nexus was released 3 years ago and is now obsolete; on the other hand Apple's iPhone 5s was released 5 years ago and gets to run iOS 12. On top of this, the vast majority of my paying customers use iOS, not Android (a variety of lifestyle and referenc…
Accounting for installation numbers only, there are about 6 Android users for each iOS user in the world. So targeting API 25 (Nougat 7.1) already gives you access to a bigger number of users. Targeting earlier API versions only increases that number.
I really wish they used version numbers rather than names so i can tell there’s a new version of android. I thought this was a just a distro for raspberry pis. It’s pretty clear in the article though, no sweat :)
They sort of do, the first letter of the new name is always the next one in the english alphabet. That said, they do have version numbers but almost no marketing uses them with or instead of the codenames. Kitkat Lolipop Marshmallow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history
The stupid thing is that these code names sometimes span multiple versions of Android and even API levels making it all even more of a clusterfuck of a platform. My suspicion is that they do this to hide all of the fragmentation and pretend that more handsets are up to date than they actually are.
I'm giving up on upgrading my apps for Android. The releases are dividing the market every single year and consequently steadily eroding sales. On the one hand Google's Nexus was released 3 years ago and is now obsolete; on the other hand Apple's iPhone 5s was released 5 years ago and gets to run iOS 12. On top of this, the vast majority of my paying customers use iOS, not Android (a variety of lifestyle and referenc…
What are you upgrading? Usually it's just a matter of changing a couple numbers in the Gradle file. The only headache with new SDKs are if you're trying to integrate new features that aren't in appcompat but even then it's straight forward to support.
I'm giving up on upgrading my apps for Android. The releases are dividing the market every single year and consequently steadily eroding sales. On the one hand Google's Nexus was released 3 years ago and is now obsolete; on the other hand Apple's iPhone 5s was released 5 years ago and gets to run iOS 12. On top of this, the vast majority of my paying customers use iOS, not Android (a variety of lifestyle and referenc…
What are you upgrading? Usually it's just a matter of changing a couple numbers in the Gradle file. The only headache with new SDKs are if you're trying to integrate new features that aren't in appcompat but even then it's straight forward to support.
There's been tons of subtle and not so subtle breaking changes from bumping targetSdkVersion, many that only manifests at runtime. Things like runtime-permission-grants, three iterations of C2DM, GCM, FCM, notification handling, inner classes in activities and fragments, background processing, NDK changes, etc etc. If you have a low-churn legacy but still useful app, coming back every year and between the subtle api changes (which require runtime testing on old and new android devices) combined with an ever-reorganized google api console and play store console and firebase console is quite an effort. But I guess that's the cost of playing in the play store and for progress in the mobile OS landscape.
I'm giving up on upgrading my apps for Android. The releases are dividing the market every single year and consequently steadily eroding sales. On the one hand Google's Nexus was released 3 years ago and is now obsolete; on the other hand Apple's iPhone 5s was released 5 years ago and gets to run iOS 12. On top of this, the vast majority of my paying customers use iOS, not Android (a variety of lifestyle and referenc…
Android developers get around 3-5 years before they stop rationalizing the potential and ditch that ecosystem.
Apple won this battle. The actual android users that "can't stand Apple and need control" have no clue what they are missing anymore. They haven't looked at Apple since 2013. Unlike Blackberry faithful, Android users really do have great more advanced technology on paper, but look, nobody cares.
I'm giving up on upgrading my apps for Android. The releases are dividing the market every single year and consequently steadily eroding sales. On the one hand Google's Nexus was released 3 years ago and is now obsolete; on the other hand Apple's iPhone 5s was released 5 years ago and gets to run iOS 12. On top of this, the vast majority of my paying customers use iOS, not Android (a variety of lifestyle and referenc…
Android developers get around 3-5 years before they stop rationalizing the potential and ditch that ecosystem. Apple won this battle. The actual android users that "can't stand Apple and need control" have no clue what they are missing anymore. They haven't looked at Apple since 2013. Unlike Blackberry faithful, Android users really do have great more advanced technology on paper, but look, nobody cares.
Sample size 1 here. I used an iPhoneX for a few months this year. It was my first iPhone, and I loathed the browser lock-in and the lack of automatic contacts sync. The UX is far less consistent than modern Android apps (e.g. the back functionality out of an app). I missed my app drawer as well. The iPhone was free from work, yet I paid out of pocket for a Galaxy S9+ so I could go back to Android.