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Reviewing the reports on the Google Play Console for my app, I can see that ~150 devices among the active installations are running Android versions 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 while I explicitly configured my build.gradle file with minSdkVersion 19. From what I know those versions have different API numbers 16-17-18 and all belong to the Jelly Bean family.

How can this happen? Am I missing something?

Console screenshot

Phantômaxx
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Massimo Baldrighi
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    What is your current `versionCode`? You may had set `minSdkVersion` to `16` at the time of your first few release to Play Store, thats why many users had been able to install your app on Android versions 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 but never updated your app. – Varad Mondkar Jul 31 '18 at 21:20
  • That's it! Silly me! I totally forgot that when I replaced the previous developer for a big update, we decided to raise the minSdk number from 16 to 19. If you put your comment as Answer I will gladly mark it as correct. – Massimo Baldrighi Aug 01 '18 at 18:53
  • I will like to do it now then :D – Varad Mondkar Aug 01 '18 at 18:56

2 Answers2

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You may had set minSdkVersion to 16 at the time of your first few release to Play Store, thats why many users had been able to install your app on Android versions 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 but they never updated your app (may be because their auto update of off or some other reason)

Varad Mondkar
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In our apps I see a some background radiation from crashes on rooted devices that have older unsupported API levels. The numbers are small and it's not anything we are supporting, so I don't really care about those.

If the device is rooted, one way to bypass min SDK restrictions is to edit the build.prop file to lie about the device's API level.

laalto
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