Why did Google jump from version 12.0.1 to 15.0.0 with Google APIs for Android?

Question

Google recently released a new version of Google APIs for Android and it struck me as pretty weird why they would jump 3 major versions up. As far as I can see they didn't explain it in the release notes, so my question stands as in the title.

Why did Google decide to jump from version 12.0.1 to 15.0.0 with Google APIs for Android?

Answer 1

Google doesn't use any major build number because of their continuous delivery.

I assume the versions 13 and 14 may have been delivered only in internal build and didn't make it to the public release.

Answer 2

This is possibly due to culture specific superstition, 13 being considered an unlucky number in western cultures, and (1)4 in eastern cultures.

Related:
Software versioning superstition (wikipedia)
Is v15 of Play Services a late April Fools joke? (reddit)
Play Services 15.0.0. Why the huge jump in version number? (reddit)

Special care may be taken to avoid occurrences or reminders of the number 4 during everyday life, especially during festive holidays, or when a family member is ill. Mentioning the number 4 around a sick relative is strongly avoided. Giving four of something is strongly discouraged. Elevators in Asia and Asian neighborhoods often skip the 4th floor or any floor whose number contains the digit "4" (as 14, 24, etc.). Military aircraft and ships also avoid the number 4 (such as the South Korean and Taiwanese navies) due to its extreme negative connotations of death. April 4 is also considered an exceptionally unlucky day (much like Friday the 13th in the West).

_{From Tetraphobia}

Answer 3

In a Reddit thread about Google's recent announcement of a new SDK versioning system, someone claiming to be a Google employee offered the following interesting explanation.

Googler here: the big version skip is just an implementation detail. We have been working on this new build process for a long time in parallel with other Play services releases and we needed to pick a "base" version where the versioning logic would change. We had to bake this version into a number of things, for instance Android Studio knows not to raise the old "different versions" lint error on 15.0.0+.

As for the semantic versioning, we actually have not been following SemVer at all in the past. The SDK just bumped by 0.2.0 each planned release, and if we made mistakes we'd release +0.0.1 patch versions until it was fixed. So for instance 10.0.0 was not a breaking change from 9.8.0, in fact it was a kind of boring release.

In the old days the version number used to tell you what version of the Play services app it was compatible with and it would be some ugly thing like 7.8.49 but we stopped doing that around 9.0

Answer 4

This is called pre-planned before releasing the version.

Why Google have switch from 12 to 15 directly

They have kept the backup of 2 version for there updates reason behind that can be

• People are not updated with the new version: If the old user are not updating there project with the new version and if something extra added to this version will be not present in old version for them, there will be update. So they can also get the same funtionality, as we can see there are around thousands of users who's app have the old version.

Example- For 12 version User there will be edited update with 13 version which will not effect any kind of there funtionality

• People who are updated with the new version: If there will be major update in the 15 version and that may cause issues that require long time to recover so till that time the user, So the user cannot wait till that time for them there will backup so that they can get rollback to version 14 and continue till the problem will resolved,

Example- For 15 version User there will be issues and rollback then they will get update with 14 version which will not effect any kind of there funtionality, they continue there work.

if both scenario comes true then there will be both option available for them

Example- For 15 version User there will be issues and rollback then they will get update with 14 version which will not effect any kind of there funtionality, they continue there work.

Example- For 13 version User there will be issues and rollback then they will get update with 12 version which will not effect any kind of there funtionality, they continue there work.

Answer 5

They didn't jump actually. Play services are released every month. Version 11 has been released in December. So in April they released version 15. I guess there was some problem in the meanwhile so they release version 12 (the january version) in March, i.e. two months later, maybe 13 and 14 weren't yet ready for production. However the versioning is totally consistent.