I have an app that I released a couple years ago (plus another legacy app that I maintain for one of my company’s clients). My game has a long-ish title, but it was fine until some asshat at Google decides that 33 characters is too long. On top of that, every time I’m forced to update the target SDK, I need to spend several hours figuring out a bunch of new build errors. This is not how I wanted to spend my vacation time.
If you have to update it, just to meet some arbitrary metric: Yeah.
Wdym arbitrary metric? If nothing would have changed then there would be no build errors and the whole process would take a few mins.
Now since something does break, that means that there’s some (soon to be) deprecated code which needs updating.
With arbitrary metric, I mean that Google doesn’t detect whether you’re actually using deprecated APIs, they just detect that you’ve declared to be targeting Android API version 27 and that 27 is smaller than 31. Especially with smaller apps, you may have to go through the whole release process just to increment that number, with no actual code changes.
Another rather arbitrary metric is how often and quickly they want to deprecate APIs. In other ecosystems, you update your app to fix security issues or because you’re developing new features. On Android, you often end up updating, because your Googly overlord demands an update.
It’s not an arbitrary metric though… They want apps to stop using old APIs so they can deprecate them at some point. Platforms that aren’t Windows (and Linux, to a lesser extent) don’t have the resources to support old stuff forever. Be glad they don’t make breaking changes more frequently, like Apple does :)
As the other guy said, we’re not talking hugely outdated. And I don’t see why they should have fewer resources for supporting old stuff. Android has more users than Windows. Less corporate users, sure, but still, I imagine Google could easily finance that and I do not see it as rational that they don’t.
Like, if Google hadn’t made the Play Store a monopoly, devs would gladly be distributing elsewhere. Many of those who aren’t looking for commercial success, do.