Go's Deprecation Policy + Android NDK

[Tomi Häsä]

I have been thinking of using Go in Android apps with Android NDK. How does the Go deprecation policy affect me in the long run? How old phones can I support? Should I use as old Go version as possible for maximum compatibility?

[Elias Naur]

Go has very few dependencies on its environment, so it should be able to run on quite old phones. I have a 4.1 device still running that I regularly test Go (with Go Mobile) on.

I would recommend using the newest Go version for your projects. There are often important fixes in newer Go versions for mobile platforms that are not backported to older releases. This mostly applies to iOS, but is true for Android as well.

Note that the mobile platforms (including Android) are not first-class platforms (https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/PortingPolicy), and breakages are therefore not release blockers. In practice, however, Go works very well on mobile.

Finally, OS'es or architectures are very slowly deprecated; the Go team pays attention to its users. For example, the planned removal of armv5 support was postponed because there were still users for it.

 - elias

[Tomi Häsä]

I have been pondering the minimum supported Android version also. First I thought of 4.0.3, which I recall is what Android Studio has been suggesting. On the other hand, Android 4.3 supports widgets "anywhere" on Android Home Screen and I might use widgets with some of my apps. Any thoughts on that? (I don't have my notes with me about the correct version numbers regarding 4.0.3 and 4.3.)

[Elias Naur]

On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 5:14 PM Tomi Häsä <tomi...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have been pondering the minimum supported Android version also. First I thought of 4.0.3, which I recall is what Android Studio has been suggesting. On the other hand, Android 4.3 supports widgets "anywhere" on Android Home Screen and I might use widgets with some of my apps. Any thoughts on that? (I don't have my notes with me about the correct version numbers regarding 4.0.3 and 4.3.)

I'm not sure what you're asking. If you mean the minimum version that Go could run on, I believe 4.0.3 is new enough to not pose any problems for you.

If you mean what minimum version your app *should* support, that's a different question. I use the Android Dashboard

https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

to make an informed decision for my own projects. A minimum version of 4.1 or even 4.3 is not unreasonable, I think. In particular if you're just starting development now.

 - elias

 

On Thursday, March 30, 2017 at 4:49:52 PM UTC+3, Elias Naur wrote:

Go has very few dependencies on its environment, so it should be able to run on quite old phones. I have a 4.1 device still running that I regularly test Go (with Go Mobile) on.

I would recommend using the newest Go version for your projects. There are often important fixes in newer Go versions for mobile platforms that are not backported to older releases. This mostly applies to iOS, but is true for Android as well.

Note that the mobile platforms (including Android) are not first-class platforms (https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/PortingPolicy), and breakages are therefore not release blockers. In practice, however, Go works very well on mobile.

Finally, OS'es or architectures are very slowly deprecated; the Go team pays attention to its users. For example, the planned removal of armv5 support was postponed because there were still users for it.

 - elias

On Thursday, March 30, 2017 at 3:35:59 PM UTC+2, Tomi Häsä wrote:

I have been thinking of using Go in Android apps with Android NDK. How does the Go deprecation policy affect me in the long run? How old phones can I support? Should I use as old Go version as possible for maximum compatibility?

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[Tomi Häsä]

Android NDK is linked to the Android version, so I was just wondering if it matters which Android version I use with Go, but you already answered my question, so thanks!