0

I'm trying to find out which Android version has which support period and lifetime. Is there any roadmap similar to Debian's?

The only information I found is that support of 1.1 ended, but no information when others will be obsolete.

I think this should be interesting for more of you to plan further strategy.

stefan.seeland
  • 2,065
  • 2
  • 17
  • 29

2 Answers2

1

I'm trying to decide which Android version has which support period and lifetime.

All Android versions have "support", to the same extent that all Debian versions that have ever been created have "support". Anyone can, with sufficient work, run whatever Android version they want, just as anyone, with sufficient work, can run any Debian version they want.

All that matters is what versions you want to support. You will make that choice, yourself, based on whether or not you think there are enough users of a given Android version to make the incremental maintenance cost worthwhile. To help you make that determination, Google publishes a chart and table of the percentage of Android devices running each significant version.

enter image description here

At the time of this writing, some developers are dropping support for Android 1.x entirely, since combined they represent 1.2% of the user base. However, that is their decision, and you have to make yours.

mklement0
  • 382,024
  • 64
  • 607
  • 775
CommonsWare
  • 986,068
  • 189
  • 2,389
  • 2,491
  • Same as Debian? The Debianproject has defined lifetime for every release in opposite to the androidproject. Debian stoppes fixing oldstable 1 year after a new stable is relesased. I found no comparable statemant from the androidproject. And: No, not every android version is still supported. The Androidproject stopped support for SDK 1.1 / Api 2 (is marked as obsolate). – stefan.seeland Apr 05 '12 at 08:50
0

There is no such thing like a software life cycle support policy for Android. Wikipedia and endoflife.date gives partial/retrospective information but without future support end date and without citation of source. The only official statements that can be found to plan the support of a software project targeting Android are hardware and Target API specific.

Looks like the Android project and google do not really care to give depending projects planning certainty.

stefan.seeland
  • 2,065
  • 2
  • 17
  • 29