Google ending Play Service support for Android 4.0

Google has announced that it is ending the support for Ice Cream Sandwich for future Play Service API releases. This means that updates for the apps on Android 4.0 will be very few, equivalent to no updates.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has support for API level 14 or 15 while Google is having the developers to target the API level 16(for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean) as the minimum level of support and drop the API level 14 or 15.

It is possible that developers can continue to maintain and release updates of their apps specifically for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich but it is unlikely that many developers will do so due to the fact that Android 4.0 runs on a very few devices around the globe.

According to the latest report from Google’s developer dashboard, the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich runs on about 0.03% Android devices all over the world. Out of 2 billion Android users all over the world, 0.03% constitute about 6 million users or so.

6 million users over the globe are still enough but considering how those Android devices may be performing or how many of them aren’t in use, it is good that Google is discontinuing the support for Android 4.0.

Android has a poor software updates state and there isn’t a chance that users having device(s) running Ice Cream Sandwich are gonna receive an update to Jelly Bean anytime. So, it is that that they consider upgrading to something modern.