Hi everyone,
Sorry it took me a while to get back to you on this, been a really busy few days in the office. Anyway I’d love to share our thoughts on why we went for support for Android 7.0 up.
Ultimately we always want to support as many devices and OS’s as we can. The diversity of devices and slightly varying OS’s in Android make it harder to support as many as we’d like to. So we looked for a balance between covering as many potential users as we can and making sure we could ship in a timely way for everyone.
Android 7.0 was chosen based upon the stats we saw for 5.0/5.1/6.0. Based upon this data we expect that 6.0 currently has less than a 10% share of our users.
We can see in stats pages such as Mobile Android Version Market Share United Kingdom | Statcounter Global Stats that in the wider UK market right now 6.0 has a market share of 13.37%. We expect this is not necessarily reflective of our early adopter, UK audience though. Given the stats we currently have for our first 1500 downloads, our users are more skewed towards newer devices and OS versions. For instance, 86% of them are on 8.0 and above, and only 14% of them are on 7.0 and 7.1. By the time we actually launch the full version of the app next year we would expect even more users will have upgraded their device or OS to newer versions.
Unfortunately the more versions of Android we support, the more time we spend finding and fixing issues on different versions and the less time we can spend building features. So right now, the Android MVP doesn’t include support for 6.0.
Potentially after we release the first Android version we could start the process of supporting 6.0 alongside building new features, if we believe it’s right for our customers.