Reasons the App Industry Should Forget Android KitKat

Regardless of the lightning-fast changes in the mobile industry, there are two giant operating systems on top right now, iOS & Android. One has the best hardware and the other produces endless options. However, Android remains the top preferable choice to date although it has too many flaws. When it comes to using wearable, smartphone devices, or desktop apps, using Android KitKat has its pros and cons.

I feel baffled each time I hear that a friend or coworker decided their brand new app should be supported on Android 4.4 or even 4.3. No doubt I admire KitKats and Jellies but let’s face the reality: Google has served us much more trailblazing things over the last few years. There are many reasons your new app actually should have nothing to do with Android 4.4 KitKat.

Material Design

Material design is one of the most Android things you can think of (Android fanboys know what I am talking about). When choosing the version your app should be available from, you must remember that Material Design with its features (so eg. depth, colors, icons, emojis, etc.) is only available from Android 5.0.

Can you imagine Taylor Swift listening to his Endgame song on a low-quality Bluetooth speaker? Then why is it fine to you when you have your app designed with all the tiny details making it look spectacular and release it on the system that doesn’t support them? Why do you even bother and waste loads of time on the design quality then? The reason you should forget about Android KitKat and move on.

Notifications

Without notifications, every person would be looking at their mobile phones constantly and might go crazy. It is one of those things we can’t imagine smartphones without. You should know that Android 4.4 has much worse notifications solutions than it’s younger sibling “Lollipop”. You can’t see notifications when the screen is blocked, and also don’t handle incoming calls so anyone who calls you actually interferes you and prevents you from using a mobile app. Not impressed yet? Let’s move on to the third reason for forgetting Android KitKat.

Productivity

It’s quite obvious that Google tries its best for each Android release to be faster than a bolt and less energy consuming, and there is no exception when we talk about Android 4.4 and 5.0. There is a massive difference and if you don’t want to receive low marks on the Play Store from users because they consider your app slow and heavy then I believe there are at least a dozen other solutions to avoid such situation.

Devices

Speaking about productivity! Do you remember what kind of devices was leading the market four years ago? Oh, you sweet fragrance of nostalgia. Low-quality pictures and front-facing camera are just a gadget because you could barely recognize people on the pictures, that exotic 8GB of internal memory and full 1GB of RAM. It is not a perfect environment for a mobile app to show its full capabilities and be fully scalable and playful.

Target Audience

As we are not robots and humans, we usually go forward with everything, which is better. However, Android users seem to break that rule when we look at the current statistics (Don’t take the current situation for granted). Millennials don’t like to invest in legacy technology and they crave for newest and the trendiest one.

If your target audience is not older adults then I would like you to go now to any public place, a cafe, a movie theater or just take the bus to the nearest university and observe what kind of devices millennials are using. I bet you won’t find a significant number of KitKat users.

Cost

Finally, the last nail in the coffin! You might think that those problems are not yours but developers and testers are responsible for the delivery of your app. This might be true but believe me, adapting any new application to Android 4.4 takes adequate time, and time means money. Your hard earned money. We can skip material design or other native solutions and mock them somehow, surely we can find all crashes, or majority of bugs, but it really is the best case scenario stretches development time.

If you truly care about that a few percentages of KitKat users more than you care about your money that’s understandable. However, always remember that no one downgrades or buys old smartphones and instead upgrades and buys newer stuff so probably. According to our predictions, Android 4.4 will disappear from charts this year. If this year is really worth your time and money, then ditch Android KitKat?

What About the 7% of People Using Android KitKat?

According to recent statistics, 7% of all Google Play users last year logged to the store using Android 4.4 and I admit it’s quite a lot considering those four years and 8 following Android releases. Statistics do not explain this number and it can be misleading. You don’t know whether the Android KitKat user (a few rare species left) downloaded the latest version of Spotify or rather some granddaughter downloaded a mobile app for her grandmother, or maybe smartphone used as the main phone in the office.

What’s the Best Solution?

Our experts have come up with a solution. Remember a clever ad from IKEA where people started collecting things to remove from their house and sad music plays in the background. This is our only solution. So we have an ultimate solution in our hands which is to force people to throw away their old-fashioned devices and make them buy new ones. Once the users aren’t able to install or use efficiently new Android apps they will instantly change their phones.

I would say that Android Marshmallow can be a reasonable choice. The most popular release currently which is fully understandable, released in the second quarter, considering that Android Pie is still brand new and few devices have. It is absolutely fine to support the third oldest version of the operating system.

These are the flaws Android KitKat can cause to users and developers. It can be difficult to keep up with the changes in the mobile industry, so let our professionals deal with it. If you wish to build a mobile app or website for your business growth, then give ITSolution24x7, a leading android app development company, a call today.