You can be a great developer and not know the first thing about server administration. They aren't mutually inclusive skill-sets in the least. If I spend my day working on embedded systems, why would I give a rat's ass about a webserver?
Not to mention there are still plenty on new GB phones sold in developing markets.
He's advocating dropping potentially 30% of his potential consumers because it's technically easier. Some of us can probably afford that, some can't. But I just think broad statements like "Just drop support for the older version, it'll push people to upgrade and make the entire system better" is a stupid argument.
The reality is people paid a lot of money for their sweet new Android 2.3 phones 2 years ago or less. Why should you punish them now and not spend the extra time to make your app work well there?
The biggest problem with GB that I've seen isn't necessarily the lack of certain APIs , but the constraints in terms of resources on phones with GB, which tend to have worse hardware (because they are older devices or lower-end devices). If you think by developing on ICS/JB you magically can stop worrying about performance or resource constraints, you'd be mistaken. Some of the new cheaper Android phones in developing markets are very resource constrained.
Cheap devices aren't going away. Dropping GB support does not mean you can stop writing performance-optimized code or profiling your app.
Interesting tone. I would have flipped it to the opposite: "He's advocating dropping support for the 30% least valuable users, who are in reality your least likely customers. Some large developers might be able to support such a cost, like Facebook, but for most developers its probably not worth the cost.
People with older phones that they paid only a few hundred bucks for two years ago should not have the expectation for it to keep working. It is not punishment, they can continue to use their devices as is perfectly fine."
It's true, Gingerbread devices are still very common (I have a rooted Kindle Fire that's still running GB, and there's nothing I can do to change that). However, something to note is that there are new Gingerbread phones being sold in the US right now. A friend of mine just bought one. He's a student without a lot of money, and it was inexpensive and didn't require a long term contract. He doesn't have data on this phone, or even text messages. He has voice only, and does everything else over wifi.
They're still out there, absolutely.
Also, writing code to work well on lower end phones might be a pain, but it means it's going to make your app even smoother on the higher end devices. It requires more time, buy you get more of a performance buffer.
...but I understand that only techies dare to go download random images from the interwebz and attempt flashing their device. Personally, my Kindle Fire is running this SimpleCM9 Android 4.0.4 quite well.
Well I'll be. I guess I hadn't taken a look at what's being done to modify the Kindle Fire in a while, I shouldn't have doubted someone would build a newer ROM for it :)