Saying Goodbye to Android 2.3 Gingerbread | Hacker News Reader

Saying Goodbye to Android 2.3 Gingerbread

shatteredpixel.com

93 pointsJoshTriplett24 comments

I was stuck using Android honeycomb way past its prime for a few years as a kid. Granted that was years ago so it's /really/ past its prime now, but I was definitely grateful for the developers who still supported my device since I didn't have the choice to get a newer one.

Tangentially, there are parts of Honeycomb I miss, like a coherent task manager that actually killed app processes when I asked it to, being able to easily root my device with no real downsides, etc.

As an Android app developer, I'd say that Honeycomb was a very odd release. It only (officially) supported tablets, its sources were never released, but it already had GPU acceleration for UI rendering (aka HWUI), most of the new APIs like view transforms and animators, and a very first iteration of the Holo theme. From my point of view, it never saw much adoption. As 4.0 was released, many 3.0 devices were updated to it, including both tablets I had for testing. So, naturally, when I dropped 3.0 together with 2.3.3, no one really noticed, despite the app having tens of millions of users.

Good on them for sticking it out. I'm keeping Android 2.3 support in my game engine for as long as there's no need to remove it. (Dropped Android 1.6 three years ago). Its days are numbered, but I expect I will never drop Windows 95 (OSR2) support - it will always be a novelty OS people actually run for fun, unlike old Android.

I'm not sure I believe all these 0.0% usage stats for all mildly old versions. I lent my spare Android 2.2 phone to someone just a couple months ago.

> I'm not sure I believe all these 0.0% usage stats for all mildly old versions. I lent my spare Android 2.2 phone to someone just a couple months ago.

A quick Google search suggests there's about 2.5 billion android users. 0.05% of those users (i.e. a rounding error) is still 1.25 million users, so plenty of room for people to still be using old versions but not show up in proportional usage estimates.

Yes, but I wonder, do many second-hand smartphones end up in poorer countries and then undercounted? AFAIK these stats typically are derived from traffic to certain websites or telemetry from certain apps (or Google Play?); looking just at English websites/apps would then significantly undercount.

Is your game engine publicly available or something you use in your own games only? If the former, what’s it called and is it open source?

It's open source: the OHRRPGCE. I'm co-maintainer. Released over 23 years ago, originally as a DOS program, which is why we have such low requirements. Oh, and we try to provide backcompat support for all games ever made, although before ~2002 the backcompat is sometimes not complete.

https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce

https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/System_Requirements

Good memories! Never used the engine myself but played Wandering Hamster back when I was into QBasic.

After 24 years James still works on Wandering Hamster from time to time! It's always fun to see how many people have heard of it or the engine.

https://github.com/bob-the-hamster/wander

As a kid I was really into QBasic and game maker software (think RM2k and the like). OHRRPGCE was a perfect intersection of these two interests - I remember being super impressed that something so complex could be made in my favorite language. I also have fond memories of James's site and think of the Technomancy page [1] every time something goes wrong with a machine I'm using or a piece of software I'm working on.

I miss the old internet. Thanks to you and James for being a huge part of my childhood!

[1] https://james.hamsterrepublic.com/technomancy/

I had that same amazement about something so complex written in QuickBasic, which is why I dived in when it was open-sourced and took delight in the dense (bad!) code and hacks to meet Real-mode limitations. I've been contributing ever since, but I can't take credit; the engine was only open-sourced in 2005.

And Technomancy remains at the forefront of my mind too :)

BASIC based? Quite cool.

Android 2.2 dropped almost 11 years ago. Most Android hardware doesn’t make it 5 years let alone a decade.

That’s before considering the lack of software support. Most websites today probably won’t even load correctly with its web browser (a browser that didn’t support most web standards even just after release).

It’s just time to let it go.

Seems like a decision well-backed by data. Really, huge kudos for keeping old versions of Android for so long!

Impressive but ridiculous. Should have dropped support a long time ago.

I remember hating that about android development. It was like desktop OS and browsers but with the added dimension of the manufacturer not caring.

Desktop OSes don't tend to change as much between releases so it's easier to keep support for older versions longer.

Specially Android game development becomes easier once you can target Vulkan only and you are running third party rendering system (since many Open GL ES 2.0 and 3.0 drivers are quite buggy). With iOS Metal only has been possible for years.

This specific game is a 2D pixelart rogue-like game, with simple UI, simple graphics, and no need for anything real-time. Vulkan is way overkill for that, and so is Unity.

Except that everyone doing games in Java/Kotlin kind of needs to move into Unity, because Vulkan is only available as NDK API, with a very bare bones support from Google beyond "just clone this github repo with tools".

Also if you want a good Vulkan experience, better care only about Samsung and Google devices and ignore everything else.

Sad but probably the sensible option.

Ever since I saw Minecraft running on Windows 98 a few years back I've sort of had an obsession with running things on obscenely outdated systems (that and I've a distaste for the bloatedness of modern programs) Minecraft is sort of lucky though as it's running on Java (although it still requires at least some modding effort to get it to run these days)

My personal "support even if it's a bit insane" programming bracket goes back to Windows XP because it's my favourite and I was pretty upset when MS discontinued it. (Especially with Windows 8 just released)

I always wondered how and why there were so many Pixel Dungeon clones, and I only just now learned via this article that it's because the original was open-sourced.

This is pretty old at this point. I hadn’t moved to iOS yet but did soon after. I certainly don’t miss having another computer in my pocket to maintain and can’t imagine supporting Android that long.

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