CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidreactjsreact-nativeandroid-sdk-tools
Ilja
Ilja

Reputation: 46529

Is it possible to support newer android sdk versions in react-native?

I was following setup guide for android in react-native documentation and have it up and running correctly using suggested SDK v23

However there are much newer SDK versions available, I would like to set v23 as a minimum SDK version, but use latest one as my main one.

Being new to android I'm not sure on how to achieve this, what steps should I take? I can see option to edit sdk versions in some xml files and can download latest one using Android Studio.

As a side note, what are my limitations of using SDK v23? Will it not work on newer devices, do I loose out on performance etc... ?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2192

Answers (1)

Bryan
Bryan

Reputation: 15155

According to some sources React Native does support up to API level 25, but there seems to be some disagreement on the issue. So according to official sources, React Native only supports Android API level 16 to level 23.

I haven't used React Native myself, but assuming versioning works the same as native development, an application with a compileSdkVersion lower than the version it is running against will run fine. The only limitations on the application would be that it would be unable to access the new features and APIs introduced by those higher SDK versions.

For example, Android 8.0 (API level 26) introduced a new Picture-in-Picture API, but the method used to enter picture-in-picture mode would not be available in code compiled against API level 23. Some new features may effect performance (usually positively), but an application compiled against API level 23 won't perform any worse on on a device running on API 26 than one running on API 23.

Upvotes: 1

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