Choosing the right Android versions

Android
1

Morning everyone,

I’m looking at which SDK levels to choose when compiling my Android app, and from what I can tell online, I should do something like this:

Compile using Android version (Target Framework) should be set to the highest version possible.

Target Android version should match the above unless I have a good reason to change it.

Minimum Android version - I guess I want to go as low as possible so I can target as many devices as I can. The MonoGame docs say it’s built for API 17, but can go lower. What does this mean for the lowest level I can go?

I know that the minimum target level is restricted by the Android API features you want to use, but my app is pretty much 100% MonoGame. I have the single default activity which creates and runs my game, and that’s it. All UI is in-game. I’m probably going to add another activity with a WebView to show some help files, but that’s all.

Thanks for the help!

2

Not much can add really, essentially you are correct.

Seems to me people don’t really bother targeting anything less than Android 4.2 (API Level 17), so I wouldn’t worry about that.

1 Like
3

That would have been nice but I am afraid recent version will crash on devices lower than 4.4 due to recent commits and errors with the fallback code.

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4

Thanks for the replies! I’ll try different versions in the emulator, but I guess 4.4 would be fine. The distro dashboard shows that only ~4% of devices are lower than 4.4.

5

I pushed a PR with my fixes for those issues,

6

Ah cool - thanks for the update :grin: I’m using the stable version 3.7.1 - I guess I’ll have to download the latest from GitHub and compile from source?

Cheers!

7

Once’d it’s merged yes, you can download the latest SDK builds from http://www.monogame.net/downloads/ under the ‘Development Builds’.