Google has announced that it will end Google Play Services support for Android 4.4 KitKat, released almost ten years ago. With this, the operating system will no longer be compatible with future updates of the software, which connects the company’s services and the applications downloaded from the official store.
Android 4.4 KitKat was released in October 2013. According to Google, less than 1% of the devices currently used have this version of Android installed.
It stopped being updated a long time ago: Google released its last update in July 2014, months before Android 5.0 Lollipop arrived.
Even security updates stopped being distributed for this version many years ago: the last one that is known is from 2017.
The end of Google Play Services support for Android 4.4 KitKat can be considered the final nail in the coffin of this version of the operating system. Play Services is a software that acts as an infrastructure for Google services and the device.
Thanks to it, apps downloaded from the Play Store are able to use APIs to streamline tasks such as push notifications, access to device location, background process management, contact synchronization and more.
Without this support, the trend is that Android 4.4 KitKat will also lose compatibility with the applications that still support it.
Last end of support was in 2021
In a statement published on its blog for developers, Google says that levels 19 and 20 of the Google Play Services API will be discontinued in August 2023.
Version 19 is that of Android 4.4 KitKat, and version 20, of the first wearables compatible with Google’s system.
The last such measure had been taken two years ago, in July 2021, when Google ended support for Jelly Bean versions 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 of Android. They used levels 16, 17, and 18 of the Google Play Services APIs.