Comment by zihotki
21 hours ago
I also share this resentment. It became very hard to have a niche app for a family or a small circle. Not like it was easy before, but amount of time one needs to invest to keep it up to date with requirements is not sustainable. Web apps are also a hard thing once you consider hosting and storage expenses.
If you have an app for a small restricted audience, it shouldn't need to meet Play Store requirements, just basic Android ones.
I think both of you and TFA misunderstand what the targetSdkVersion is.
If your app barely uses any permissions (like TFA's apps), you just need to update the targetSdkVersion in the manifest once per year and push the update. That's it. You're not updating SDKs or compiling against a newer SDK or anything.
It's not that simple. If it were that simple Android Studio wouldn't show you a big red error when you do that and they wouldn't have built an entire assistant for the purpose of incrementing a number[0]. The reason is that bumping the targetSdkVersion changes various behavior, sometimes in a breaking manner. A good recent example is that 34 -> 35 will force edgeToEdge rendering on all activities unless you opt-out per-window (and 35 -> 36 removes the opt-out). So simply doing what you said would probably lead to UI elements appearing behind the nav/status bars and the app being unusable (on API 35+ devices, from my understanding).
[0] https://developer.android.com/build/sdk-upgrade-assistant
You do need a newer SDK to update the target-sdk-version though. And you may find that libraries you used are not compatible, unless you update them, and updating them may break things. Maybe for a minimal app in pure java or kotlin this won't be a problem.
There was an open-source app that hasn't been updated in a few years that was delisted from the store. I decided to try my hand at recompiling to target latest required sdk "target" or whatever. It used Xamarin / C# and some additional libraries. It does not talk to the internet, it's just a minimal remote-control and data-logger for a bluetooth multimeter. If you can find a copy of the last APK published and sideload it, it works. But if you try to update the SDK so you can target the required SDK version for the Play Store, compile fails, misc cryptic errors due to libraries. Updating libraries was tricky for me because while I'm quite familiar with C, C++, Python, Go (etc), I'm not at all familiar with Android, Java, Kotlin, nor C#, visual-studio, etc. After a few days of struggle I managed to update libraries and fix the build, but the app's layout was totally broken, only one button appears (and again I'm not familiar with any of this stuff).
This app really didn't need any updates. It's a < 20MB app to control a local device, and it still works. At least you can still side-load it. Sheesh.
> You do need a newer SDK to update the target-sdk-version though.
No you don't.
You probably should just use an older version of Android Studio for your case which supports the original compileSdkVersion from the original gradle build. Then update the targetSdkVersion in the manifest and that's it.
1 reply →