From iPhone to Android Question

Question

(I'm coming from an iPhone dev world. )

In Android do we need to worry what OS version we compile against? In the iPhone world I would usually target a release that's at least 6 months old to limit the number of issues with installing on iPhones with old OSs.

What strategy should I use when choosing what to compile against on the Android?

Answer 1

I would strongly recommend to compile with the latest OS-version, since older versions might contain bugs. For example, I run into nasty bugs with correct identification of hdpi-drawables and mdpi-drawables if I compile my apps for 1.5, instead of 2.1. However, if you would like your app to work on older versions you might want to try compiling them to this version just to make sure you are not using any API-calls that does not exist for the older version.

Answer 2

There are serval factors you have to think about:

• your target group: who should be able to install your app? there are still lots of phones available that use 1.5 and 1.6. Following this link: http://developer.android.com/intl/de/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html you'll can get up to date infromation about android platform versions. They are updated regularly. If possible I would try to support 1.5 and 1.6

  • are there any features you need to have which aren't supported in earlier versions? For example it can be really hard to implement an app that uses blueetoth with android version before 2.0

Answer 3

I am also new to the Android platform and I found these articles useful.

• API Levels http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/api-levels.html
• Future-Proofing Your Apps http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/future-proofing.html
• Backward Compatibility for Applications http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/backward-compatibility.html

Answer 4

One place to start would be the breakdown of Platform versions at the Android Developer site.

This shows that a sizeable proportion of Android users are still on 1.5, so unless your application absolutely requires features only available in Android 2.1 then it makes sense to make sure your application runs on 1.5 as well.

You can produce a single app which will run on multiple versions of Android; you don't need to compile against a single version. However, you will probably want to test all on 1.5, 1.6 and 2.1.