[on_and_off]

>It sounds like you're rolling with whatever Google's latest 'solution' to fragmentation

> You say that O/P/Q are 88% of your devices but they only represent 38.7% of devices accessing the market

NO !!

That's the issue with these articles. They just read the android dashboard and pretend that:

- it applies everywhere

- many different devices = difficulty for the devs or users

The dashboard reports the global figures. These figures are heavily skewed by third world countries where old versions of Android are still shipping.

"The market" ... this is absolutely meaningless. If you work for let's say Lyft, the market is wherever lyft can operate, that's not the whole world, so whatever the Android version dashboard tells is meaningless for you or your users.

For our market 88% of the users are O or superior. 6 months ago we stopped supporting devices older than lollipop for this particular app (IIRC it was because they don't support TLS 1.3 and it was giving us some security concerns). For the app I worked on before, we had legacy apks : apks that are still distributed on the play store but that we don't maintain. Basically when we decided to stop "supporting" an old Android version. And by old; I mean Android Eclair; this was a pretty popular app with tons of users on various devices. So we take our current app that still support that old API level. We make sure that it is as stable as we can get it (since we always launch new features, we always have new corner cases, we make sure these are handled). And when it is ok; we set this apk as a legacy one on the play store : if you have one of these old Android versions, you are going to be able to continue using or even installing that older apk. Technically we can update it if we want to, but unless there is suddenly a wave of crashes or complaints we just leave it be.

Even for that app, the figures were roughly the same (and that's while being available in 150 countries, that was for a pretty popular app). For these legacy apks, we often had something like 10k installs, while the main app is in the dozens of millions (but since that app had a paid subscription, make the service work even for old device was a must do).

And yeah, even for that job where we had an app available on API 7+ (Android 2.3 eclair IIRC), the figures were still pretty similar and fragmentation was something I read about in stupid articles, not a part of my daily job. I am not working for Google, if I had to solve fragmentation issues everyday, I would be the first to complain about it. I am here to build an app, not maintain random OEMs hacks.

[p1necone]

This reminds me of browser usage stats showing that x% of people are still using IE 6 or whatever. In reality a huge number of those are probably web crawlers or malware or something spoofing it's browser id.

[izuchukwu]

I believe in the comment you’re replying to, “the market” is actually referring to the Android Market, the original name of the Google Play Store, rather than the economic market of serviceable users.

[on_and_off]

ah, I see.

It still misses the whole point though.

Again, the global numbers are pretty meaningless for app developers.

Even if your app is called gmail, at some point you will see that you have 0.01% of your users on a very old version of Android. And you are not going to cut them off, just freeze an apk that will be their last version.

And for almost all apps, your useage stats won't look like these global numbers.

We are doing everything we can to increase our user numbers .. if it meant lowering the min supported version, we would do it but it is just not something that would help us.