Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb to lose Google Play Services support

Although improvements are always great, it is sad to see support for older operating systems disappearing. Now, the time has come for Google Play Services to drop support for Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb, but those still using these outdated platforms can still use them for at least a few more weeks.

According to a post that Doug Stevenson published on the Android Developers Blog, "The Gingerbread platform is almost six years old. Many Android developers have already discontinued support for Gingerbread in their apps. This helps them build better apps that make use of the newer capabilities of the Android platform. For us, the situation is the same. By making this change, we will be able to provide a more robust collection of tools for Android developers with greater speed."

The article mentioned above highlights that version 10.0.0 of the Google Play services client libraries and the Firebase client libraries for Android are the last ones to support Android API level 9 (minimum requirement being Android 2.3 Gingerbread). The next release of these libraries will bring the version number up to 10.2.0 and will also increase the minimum supported API level to 14, which requires at least Android 4.0.1 Ice Cream Sandwich.