[veeti]

His work also highlights the lack of support given by Google for backwards compatibility. Stuff like action bar (one of the biggest new UI changes in 3.0+) backwards compatibility is essential if you design your app around the new patterns and guidelines. Their official recommendations for having an action bar in 2.3 and below are:

1. Reimplement almost the whole action bar on 2.3 and below by building on top of their "ActionBarCompat" example which is very minimal and only supports menu items - if developers take this approach, there's going to be a lot of inconsistent action bars out there.

2. Just forget the action bar on older versions of Android (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/say-goodbye-t...), which is terrible advice - you can't just pretend that it never existed when the whole app is designed around it. Thankfully they don't believe this themselves since all their apps have some sort of action bar implementation on older versions too.