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.
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As the other guy said, we’re not talking hugely outdated.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.