Pour one out for Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich: Google announced today
that it’s dropping support for Ice Cream Sandwich for future Play
Service API releases, meaning updates for apps on the older version of
Android will likely be few and far between, via 9to5Google.
Google is instead having developers target API level 16
(for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean) as the minimum level of support. And while,
in theory, developers can continue to maintain and update a version of
their apps specifically for Ice Cream Sandwich users that support API
level 14 or 15, it’s unlikely that many will do so.
It’s not the most surprising news: according to Google’s developer dashboard,
as of October 26th, only 0.03 percent of Android users were still
running Ice Cream Sandwich. Still, 0.03 percent of the nearly 2 billion
Android phones in the world works out to a hefty 6 million or so phones
and tablets that might be affected — even if its likely that many of
them aren’t still in active use.
Given the poor overall state of Android software updates,
chances are if you’re still using a phone with Ice Cream Sandwich,
you’re probably not getting an update to Jelly Bean anytime soon. Maybe
consider an upgrade to something a little more modern?