A moment of silence, please: Google has discontinued support for two of the oldest Android operating system versions.
In an upcoming update to Google Play Services, Google will finally kill off support for Android 2.3 Gingerbread and Android 3.0 Honeycomb. The 10.2.0 update, which is expected to roll out in early 2017, will increase the minimum supported API level to 14 – that’s Android 4.0.1 Ice Cream Sandwich.
“The Gingerbread platform is almost six years old,” explains Doug Stevenson, Developer Advocate at Google. “Many Android developers have already discontinued support for Gingerbread in their apps. This helps them build better apps that make use of the newer capabilities of the Android platform. For us, the situation is the same.”
He added: "By making this change, we will be able to provide a more robust collection of tools for Android developers with greater speed.”
Android Gingerbread launched way back on December 6, 2010, with the latest version arriving on September 21, 2011. It was the follow-up to 2.2.3 Froyo, and introduced support for extra-large screen sizes, a new UI, and support for NFC – years before we needed it for Android Pay. As of September 5, 2016, around 1.5% of all Android devices that access Google Play were still running Gingerbread.
Then came Honeycomb 3.0 on February 22, 2011, which was a new Android variant designed for devices with larger screen sizes, specifically tablets. It debuted with the long-forgotten Motorola Xoom tablet, which featured an Nvidia Tegra 2 T20 chip, 1GB of RAM, and a 5-megapixel primary camera. Honeycomb also added a two-pane UI for the Email and Contacts app, a new full-screen mode for the Gallery app, and a redesigned keyboard for typing on tablets.
