LAUNCHDARKLY DEVELOPER SURVEY: Android API versions and Android Gradle plugin versions

[eli-darkly]

From the LaunchDarkly SDK team:

We're posting this to get feedback from our customers who use the LaunchDarkly Android SDK. The basic questions we're asking are:

1. What is the oldest Android API version that your LaunchDarkly-enabled applications need to support?
2. What major version of the Android Gradle plugin do you use? (Or, more generally: is it at least 4.0?)

The background is that we're trying to determine if we can start modernizing our SDK code to use Java 8 language features and APIs that would require either Android API 26+ or Android Gradle plugin 4.x+.

As described here, older Android APIs lack Java 8 support, but Android Gradle plugin 3.x added some support for language features and Android Gradle plugin 4.x extended this to include many very helpful Java 8 APIs, which are in effect backported by the build tools so they work even in older Android versions.

Our SDK currently has a minimum Android API version of 21, so we cannot assume that these features will work unless the code is being built by version 4.0 or higher of the Android Gradle plugin. If we think that a significant number of customers are still using older versions of the plugin and cannot update their builds, then we will continue to use a more restrictive coding style.

[audkar]

minSdk: 23, AGP: 7.2.2

[rubensousa]

minSDK: 21, AGP: 7.2.2

[erawhctim]

Min: 21 (generally try not to bump this forward unless absolutely necessary) AGP: 7.2.1 (generally try to update AGP pretty aggressively/frequently)

Additionally, you may want to query current customers & reach out via email to get responses instead of via GH? I may not have even found this link if I wasn't here to report an issue/ask an SDK question (and I imagine there's a significant % of customers that don't even visit the issues page 🤷)

[eli-darkly]

@erawhctim We try to use a number of different channels to survey people, and this is one of them.

[petrazavadska]

minSDK: 28, AGP: 7.3.0

[orafaaraujo]

minSdk: 26, AGP: 7.3.1

(Same as mentioned above, we try to keep our libraries up to date as much as possible)

[denis-bezrukov]

minSdk: 23 (with no option to bump it) AGP: 7.3.1

[kaling852]

minSDK: 21 AGP : 8

[davemckelvie]

minSdk: 25, AGP: 8

I'm not sure it's even possible to have an AGP version of 4 or below and still release updates to the Play Store. You wouldn't be able to keep to the Play Store's targetSdk requirements.