On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Greg Donald <[email protected]> wrote:
> From where I sit Android is becoming really hard to keep up with. I > have a ton of 2.1 users still so I need to stay with API version 7. > The current API is 13, that's almost double the version I need to stay > at. I can't force people to upgrade or buy a new phone. Meanwhile > the SDK docs show more and more "non documentation" for API version 7 > every day due the continuing deprecation. > What's a developer to do? > Pick the minimum version you want to support, and focus on that. The API version is just a number. It is bumped every time there are new APIs introduced. Whether this happens 4 times in a year as a smaller series of updates, or one time as a large update, it's still the same number of APIs being added. Also each bump is a pure progression from the previous, so if you only want to think about the minimum version you want to support (let's say API 7) and the highest (let's say 13), just look at those and the fact that there are some API levels between them is irrelevant. As a general rule, we don't deprecate a method in the API unless it is (a) something developers simply should not use, (b) something developers no longer need to care about (such as APIs from 1.5), or (c) something that has an alternative for any developers who want that functionality. In the case of getOrientation(), it is trivial to use the old API instead of the new getRotation(). It was important to deprecate the old API because it was causing a lot of confusion, and doing this helps make it stand out that there is an important issue with the API. We have been deprecating a lot of other things like Activity's managed cursor APIs because we now have a much better solution (Loaders) which is usable down to 1.6 (through the support lib). This doesn't mean you can't continue to use the original API (and as a general rule I don't think the original documentation is typically removed), but for any new developer looking at the documentation it is important to direct them to a better way to go. -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer [email protected] Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
