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I've been developing an android app for a while now, but it turned out that my friend cannot install the finished app because he is using android version 5. I, first of all, want to check till which version of android will the app be supported, and if possible edit the backward compatibility.

Vedant Jumle
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2 Answers2

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First of all, changing the min SDK versions greatly affects your reach in the market, before doing this you should see how this benefits you and if the effort is justified

Historically you would find information regarding Android OS versions on https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards under Platform versions but now

You can find platform version information in Android Studio's Create New Project wizard.

In your case you wish it either way. So continuing, to change the minSDK is not that difficult, as indicated already by @Muhamed El-Banna or by @ADM.

The problem if your application still works is another thing completely.

If you use APIs that are non-existing in Android version 5, your application will throw a runtime exception of ClassNotFound. An example would be if you use safe webview browsing setSafeBrowsingEnabled() that has been added in Android 8.0 (API 26) https://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/managing-webview#safe-browsing Your IDE should pick up on such APIs. After you set the minSDK in your project look for warnings/errors in your code.

You can also manually search for when the methods you use were added by directly searching them on https://developer.android.com or by viewing changes added in each platform https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platforms

This would take a while, a faster (not necessarily better) way would be to run the application in an emulator and make sure you have full code execution coverage. If anything does not work because of non-existing APIs in that version, you fix it (would also be nice to add tests for that particular case)

abarbatei
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check your minSdkVersion in build.gradle file

make it

    minSdkVersion 16

According to SDK Releases This will support from jellybean 4.1

Muhamed El-Banna
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