Are Android versions irrelevant from now on?

With 7 years into Android mobile usage and 5 years into its application development, do you know what's the most common question that bugs an Android user or a developer?

It’s “Is my phone getting KitKat/ Lollipop/ Oreo?”, "Does my code requires any change in Orea/Pie?"

This turned to be a nightmare for companies like Oppo/Vivo/Samsung who tweaks around the open source version of Android a lot and feel users should not much care about versions and rather their view should be around performance & features. Google has worked towards it and today Android versions are not important anymore. Here's why.

The security patches which has been separated from main version updates since 2015 has been a good push towards this. But, it still requires user interaction to start it which is difficult considering the new smartphone users from developing countries are technically less sound which has been a talking point since two years with Build for Billions campaign by Google(https://developer.android.com/docs/quality-guidelines/building-for-billions)

This year in Google developer conference, the company announced Project Mainline. This makes Android updates more modular enabling critical parts of the operating system to updated separately. Google play & cloud infrastructure which is already in place doesn't require users to specifically click the download button or restart their devices. decouples the update of critical parts in the operating system to its main versions.

While Google speaks about performance improvements with every version upgrade, but a real-world test by people like Gary Sims shows the improvement is negligible in the last few years.

This maturity in the Android operating system moved innovation & must-have features into apps than in the operating system itself. With the Jetpack & Android X for developers which makes sure that code works fine across platforms, security & other critical components not directly tied to Android versions  & performance improvements way negligible make version upgrade irrelevant now than ever.

Image reference: https://mindster.in/sites/all/themes/mindsterfresh/img/blog/android-version-history.png