Why you should bump your Android app minsdk?
You should always keep bumping your minSdk version for the Android app. Newer API levels (OS versions in Android) come with more fixes and features that you can start using. But if you're required to make that case, this document should help.
What you get:
Features:
Android Studio currently already provides a neat listing (with a picker and all) everytime you create an Android Studio project. For the lazy, i'll include a screenshot from each of those APIs.
If there's a feature not on that list, that you think is worth calling out, send a PR and we'll add it here!
Bugs:
Sometimes there are terrible bugs/limitations with OS versions (or the phone manufacturer variant of that OS). If you notice these and want to make the world for AndroidDev better, send a PR and we'll add it here!
Features that are not user facing:
There are programmer facing features like language features (Lambdas, method references, try with resources) that are hugely critical for developers. These are usually not called out in that new Android Studio project creator listing. If you know of these and want to make the lives of other AndroidDev better, send a PR!
Removes Apache HTTP client. Compulsory to use HttpURLConnection class for API calls.
Removes programmatic access to the device’s local hardware identifier like MAC or Bluetooth address.(From now onwards WifiInfo.getMacAddress() and the BluetoothAdapter.getAddress() methods will return a constant value of 02:00:00:00:00:00
.)
ART runtime support
64-bit NDK support
Optimized multidex in dev builds (Faster build times)
Native VectorDrawable
and AnimatedVectorDrawable
support (none of the ugly workarounds required if you use the native version. Read this post).
Native JobScheduler
use (i.e. if you'd rather not use Firebase JobDispatcher)
Introduced Camera2 API
Location
objects send back elapsed realtime nanoseconds (this is important for getting the "age" of the location fix)setPaddingRelative
that risks a stackoverflow error.No, don't use anything below 14 please.