OpenStreetMap
Vespucci 11.2 BETA Highlights
Posted by SimonPoole on 30 October 2018 in English. Last updated on 1 November 2018.The beta should be available on googles playstore and from out github repo in a couple of days. No fancy pictures of new features as there are none.
End of support of Android 2.3 and 3.x for builds distributed on google play store
As announced previously this version no longer supports Android versions prior to 4.0 on googles playstore due to restrictions that google is now imposing. It is however possible to either build your own APK with support for earlier Android versions and likely we will be distributing such a version via F-Droid and our github repository.
Do be able to do this we now have two build flavors:
- current that is built against a current Android support library and supports Android 4.0 (14) and higher.
- legacy that is built against the last support library that supported 2.3, but will naturally run on any later Android version too-
Right now the current build mainly profits from bug fixes to the support libraries, for example the issue with sub-menus on tablets is resolved in the version we build the current flavor against.
This is not a commitment to supporting 2.3 indefinitely, but as we suspect that google will be increasing the minimum Android that practically can be supported in the future we expect that the legacy build will continue as a vehicle to support older versions.
Changes for Android 2.3
On devices that only supply 32MB or less of heap to apps, memory usage of Vespucci had gotten to the point at which the app could potentially completely run out of available memory. To work around this a bit we’ve stopped loading the simplified country boundaries which saves roughly 4MB, this implies that any country specific features will not work. Further we recommend to, instead of the standard bundled preset, to load the untranslated one (see the on device Preset help page) which will save roughly another 3MB (mainly because we don’t build a translated search index then).
Miscellaneous
- Internationalization support for OSM Notes and other tasks has been improved.
- Note and bug status is displayed in the disambiguation menu.
Discussion
Comment from westnordost on 16 November 2018 at 21:20
How much percent of Vespucci users (from Google Play) are/were still on Android 2.X? StreetComplete supports Android 4.2 and up. On Google Play:
0.4% of users have an Android below 4.4 2.1% of users have an Android below 5 6.3% of users have an Android below 6
Comment from westnordost on 16 November 2018 at 21:25
Sorry, the formatting did not work:
Comment from SimonPoole on 16 November 2018 at 21:44
You are falling for Google marketing.
Comment from westnordost on 17 November 2018 at 09:36
Do you believe that the numbers shown in Google Play are fake?
Comment from westnordost on 17 November 2018 at 09:41
(Oh by the way, these numbers are for StreetComplete users, not for all users on Google Play seen here)
Comment from SimonPoole on 17 November 2018 at 11:28
I’m sure the numbers are accurate for what they are actually measuring (the OS versions of the devices installing via/accessing the play store). That does not mean that they are an accurate measure or proxy for the OS versions of the devices actually in use in one form or the other, which tends to be implied.
The sub 4.4 (non inclusive of 4.4 and mid 2018) portion of installs via the play store is 3% for Vespucci. But I wouldn’t expect most such device owners to install via the play store in the first place (more likely from F-Droid, from our repo, own builds etc).
We don’t have any numbers from any of the other ways of installing and except if we would start to record OS version in changeset tags, which I wouldn’t consider a good idea, we are simply never going to know the details (outside of OS version specific regressions, which has happened now and then :-/).
Comment from westnordost on 17 November 2018 at 11:36
True. I also would be very curious about how many people actually install the apps from F-Droid instead of Google Play and to see the OS distribution there. It can only be lower on average.