Gingerbread and Honeycomb to lose Google Play Services support in early 2017

According to Google's latest Android distribution number, Gingerbread (released in 2010) is present on 1.3 percent of devices, while Honeycomb (released February 2011) is active on 0.1 percent of devices. 

Now, Google has announced that it will drop support for the five to six year old Gingerbread and Honeycomb Android platform in Google Play services. The Google Play services 10.0.0 and Firebase 10.0.0 client libraries for Android, will be the last version of these libraries to support Android API level 9.

The next version of these libraries 10.2.0 will release in early 2017, and will increase the minimum support API level from 9 to 14, which means Android versions older than Ice Cream Sandwich will not be supported in the official API's. As a result, Gingerbread (2.3) and Honeycomb (3.0/3.1/3.2) will not be supported and Google Play Services 10.0.0 will be the last version.

With version 10.2.0 or above of Google Play services, developers will have to either target API level 14 as the minimum supported version or build multiple APKs to support older devices with API level less than 14.

Via | Source

Kaiser Bey

Kaiser is a tech enthusiast who likes to write, read and talk about tech. He dreams of going to Mars and never come back. We hope that you find his posts on AndroGuider helpful and informative