Google Play services will officially drop Gingerbread and Honeycomb support soon

How are the age-old Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb flavors still a thing? Well, they’re not… exactly, although the former, initially released way back in December 2010 and last polished over 5 years ago, before Ice Cream Sandwich entered the mobile dessert menu, is somehow still running on 1.3 percent of active Android devices, according to the latest official count.

That’s one full percentage point over Nougat’s minuscule early November slice of the pie, and we wouldn’t be altogether shocked to see the newest OS build incapable of cracking 1 percent share next month as well.

But in case the 1.3 percent didn’t get the idea it was finally time to move on from both a hardware and software standpoint, Google will effectively pull the plug on their app updates sometime in “early 2017.”

Play services and Firebase for Android are escalating to a minimum supported API level of 14 with version 10.2.0, up from 9 in 10.0.0, helping developers “build better apps that make use of the newer capabilities of the Android platform.”

The October 2011-launched 4.0.1 Ice Cream Sandwich is to become the oldest officially supported Android iteration in the “next scheduled release” of the Google Play services client libraries, with both 2.3 Gingerbread and tablet-only 3.0 Honeycomb, which has long fallen beneath the 0.1 percent obsolescence mark, dead and buried for good.

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