CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidgoogle-play
Aaron Murray
Aaron Murray

Reputation: 2030

Is it possible to publish apps to Google Play Store that target Android devices back to KitKat?

I am new to developing Android apps, just started learning. Deciding to go with a very simple app (game), to start with, for learning purposes, I did some research on the different versions of Android devices, and found as of May 2019, KitKat (Android 4.4 / API 23) still had about 6% of the total devices (which equated at that time to roughly 172.5 million devices). My thought was this would be a good cutoff/target to build this app.

However, I have since learned that (as of August 1, 2019 for new apps, and November 1, 2019 for updates), Google Play requires a minimum level of Pie (Android 9 / API 28) to be used.

Does this mean that I can not publish an App that supports older devices back to KitKat? Or am I not understanding something?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 304

Answers (1)

ianhanniballake
ianhanniballake

Reputation: 200080

The targetSdkVersion is completely separate from the minSdkVersion you use as per the Picking your compileSdkVersion, minSdkVersion, and targetSdkVersion blog post.

While Google Play requires that you target a recent version of Android, you can set your minSdkVersion to any value.

Upvotes: 2

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