Every app on a phone declares the oldest Android version it is willing to install onto. That declaration is routine, necessary and entirely normal — every shipped app has one. It is set by the company that wrote the app, not by the company that sold you the handset, and not by you. The combined effect of all of those declarations on one specific handset is written down nowhere, and it is the thing that actually decides when that handset stops being useful.
The date that is published
Every Android handset carries a date the manufacturer decided: how long it keeps receiving system updates. It is a real date, it is on the device, and it is the one the whole argument about old phones is conducted over.
It deserves to be known, and it answers a specific question: what this handset should not be trusted with. It does not answer the question people actually use it for, which is when the handset stops working for them.
The dates that are not
Walk through how a phone leaves service in an ordinary household. It is rarely retired on a date anybody looked up. It is retired on the morning that something the house depends on refuses to run on it: the bank, the app the school sends messages through, whatever the car park by the office uses now.
The mechanism itself is documented and unremarkable. An app declares minSdkVersion, and Android's own guidance is blunt about what follows: the system prevents installation if the lowest API level the app requires is higher than the device's. Play surfaces that to the person as a message saying the app was made for a newer version of Android.
So what is worth noticing is not the mechanism. It is where the mechanism sits:
- The manufacturer's date is one date, published, and on the device.
- The version floors are many dates, held by companies that never sold you the handset, moved independently of each other, and announced on no schedule at all.
The reasons behind each one are usually mundane: a platform feature the app wanted, a tier of devices it could no longer test on, a dependency that moved underneath it. Whatever the reason, it was formed inside that company, with no view of your handset, and there is no place where the combined effect on one handset is written down.
So the date you can look up is not the one that decides, and the dates that decide can be found out only by trying.
The check
So try. This takes a few minutes and costs nothing.
- Write down the three or four things that genuinely have to work on that handset for the job you have in mind. Not everything you have ever installed — the short list the job actually requires.
- On that handset, not on the one in your pocket, open each of those in the Play Store.
- Read what it says. An app whose floor is above that handset will tell you, in the listing, that it cannot be installed on this device. That is the answer, and it is the current one, not a forecast.
Two things fall out of doing it in that order.
The list is job-specific, and that is the whole point. A handset that can no longer be someone's main phone is being judged against a list containing a bank, a payment app and a messaging app used by people who upgrade often. Judge the same handset against a list containing one camera app and a browser and you are asking a different question, and you will frequently get a different answer. The hardware did not change between those two questions. The list did.
The published date is still doing a job — a narrower one. A handset past the end of its update window is a poor place for the things you would mind losing. That is a real constraint and none of this dissolves it. It is an argument about what a handset should be asked to do, which is not the same as an argument that it is finished. Something on a shelf pointing at a door, on a network you control, is a materially different proposition to something carrying your bank.
The part where I am one of them
I publish a camera app, so I hold one of these floors, and everything above applies to me. I have not published a schedule for mine and nothing obliges me to — which is the identical complaint I have just made about everybody else. I would be writing an advertisement if I claimed my floor was somehow more considerate than a bank's.
I also cannot usefully tell you where it sits, because the answer that counts is the one the listing gives on the handset you are actually holding.
Which is the part worth taking away. A handset in a drawer does not have a retirement date sitting in it, waiting to be looked up. It has an answer it will give you in four minutes, to a question you have not written down yet.
The recorder behind these notes: Background Camera RemoteStream on Google Play — screen-off recording, local storage, live view over your own LAN.
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