A while ago (1 year), I have made the decision to drop support for Android 4.x devices for an app I am currently working on. I, of course, did that by setting the minSdk to a value greater than 19.
I tested with an old 4.x device, opened the play store, and saw the message "not compatible with your device" on my app's store page. I thought back then everything is good.
Recently, I checked some install statistics in the Google Play Developer Console and found out, that 1 year after the deprecation I am still seeing fresh install events on Android 4.x devices. I looked closer into the issue and it seems those installs are quite frequent and non neglect-able.
I am aware that my app is available on various ".apk" repository websites, but I did not expect those to be so widespread. Additionally I believe that installs from outside of the google play store did not even count against the play store statistics in the past. Has that changed?
Does anyone have similar experiences?
