What about dropping the support of KitKat

[utzcoz]

Looks like there is only 0.6% market share of Android KitKat, a very old Android version. Maybe it's time to remove KitKat supporting from Robolectric? If you have any cases that want to support the KitKat, please comment here. cc @hoisie @brettchabot.

[brettchabot]

Discussions are ongoing on dropping support for older SDKs in Robolectric, but right now several teams still run tests on SDKs <= 19 so we cannot drop support quite yet. Notably androidx generally still supports a min sdk of 14, and google play services supports a min sdk of 19.

[utzcoz]

@brettchabot Thanks for providing this information. I think we can suspend it until Google internal products decide to drop it.

[utzcoz]

@brettchabot Google Play services will drop supporting of SDK 19 & 20 at Aug 2023.

[brettchabot]

Yep thanks I'm following this space closely. The current thinking is to follow androidx's minSDK which will be jumping to 19 shortly: https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/frameworks/support/+/2657081. So I'm working on a PR to drop support for SDKs < 19 from Robolectric.

Please let me know if you have any concerns with this.

[utzcoz]

Oh, sounds great. Thanks for pointing out AndroidX's strategy for min support SDK. I want to remove old SDKs from Robolectric some months ago to reduce maintenance difficulty of code base. Great to know you're going to do this for Robolectric.

[utzcoz]

Done and released from Robolectric 4.11.x.