[guardian-dev] Popularity of Gingerbread

Nathan of Guardian nathan at guardianproject.info
Mon Aug 1 11:50:09 EDT 2016



On Thu, Jul 28, 2016, at 07:30 AM, Michael Rogers wrote:
> It seems that devices running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and earlier are
> rarely seen by the Play Store these days:
> 
> https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
> 
> Over the last couple of years I've heard stories about Gingerbread
> devices still being sold in international markets, which might not show
> up in the Play Store statistics. I'm trying to get a sense of whether
> that's still happening to a significant extent, in order to decide
> whether Briar should continue to support these older platforms.
> 
> Does anyone on the list have any data on this?
> 
> All I've been able to find so far are numbers from some Chinese online
> retailers, which suggest that phones running Gingerbread are no longer
> being sold in significant numbers:
> 
> https://code.briarproject.org/akwizgran/briar/issues/182

Three years ago in Thailand, I bought a $50USD 6 inch wifi only tablet
device running 4.0 ICS. I also bought a $100USD smartphone running
2.3.6, which seemed to be the last of its kind.

We do still see support requests for Orbot users still running 2.3.x
from time to time, and are working at adding support back in to SDK 10
and pre-PIE devices. Supporting SDK 8/9/10 is more of a gesture towards
leaving no user behind, than a practical necessity.

Another way to look at it is, if you have limited resources and need to
balance building a storage, network and battery efficient app, versus
supporting old APIs/OSes, I would say that the former is a better use of
time and skills.

+n



-- 
  Nathan of Guardian
  nathan at guardianproject.info


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