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What's getting yanked is that older phones won't connect to Android Auto enabled vehicles if the phone is running Android Nougat. It must be Running Android Oreo or later.
For those not remembering, Nougat was released in 2016 and went out of support in 2019. By the most recent metric (Dec. 2022) about 4% of all Android devices currently run Nougat. So this will affect all fifteen of the people still running this OS.
Most devices that were originally sold with Nougat have an upgrade path to Oreo. The bigger problem is folks who purchased devices with Marshmallow (orig. 2015) or Lollipop (orig. 2014) who stopped receiving upgrades past Nougat. These are the devices that will most likely be impacted by this change.
Personally, I like to keep my devices for at least five years, so them deprecating 2016 and earlier is okay with me.
On the one hand: I don't see a reason for Google to keep supporting old versions.
On the other hand: pushing an update to an old device and sabotaging it by showing an "install updates" popup (as if that's even possible for devices still running Android 7, that's bullshit) is just dickish.
The old version of Android Auto works perfectly fine. Show a popup once if you want ("your device will no longer receive Android Auto updates, third party apps may stop working") but don't actually disable anything that's working perfectly fine.
Google pulled that shit before. I would understand if they had a customer support department that'd get flooded when newer hardware stopped working, but all Google has is a forum that no Google employees ever pay any attention to.
The issue is they probably want to change serverside stuff without caring about the old stuff and the alternative to the update and it's prompt is that it will simply crash, show errors, hang or whatever....
I don't really see what server side stuff an app on the dashboard of a car would need. Their Google Maps API works all the way back to the one installed with Android 2, and failing that users can install a number of navigation apps. Same with their music app (they already killed Play Music anyway).
The only thing I can think of is that they'd be killing Google Assistant on old phones, but that wouldn't mean the rest of Android Auto couldn't still work.
No idea but I don't see why would bother with that if it isn't because it breaks in nasty ways (maybe with possible legal consequences?).
We need to get to a point where smartphone work for more than 5 years. Hardware wise the battery is the only part that is guaranteed to need to be replaced.
Now whether they do it by stopping the race on Android version or supporting every device is up to them.
Desktop OS (Windows or Linux) support any version as long as the PC is powerful enough. Why on phone we're limited not by the capabilities of the CPU but its release date?
Windows 10 will stop being supported next year, and Windows 11 can't be installed on old computers without regedit trickery.
32bit support was cut from most Linux distros.
So while it's true that desktop hardware is supported a lot longer, it's not supported indefinitely.
I don't think you understand how percentage works.
All 120 million, actually.
How many of them have a compatible car, and are using it?
The odds are as lot of those devices aren't even phones.
Damn, android os versions sound so tasty.
What's this is version numbers? I don't know if this whimsical naming thing works for other brains but between android, debian, R, etc, etc, it no longer registers for me...