And 2% of 300 million is? Note that the number is not too different than all Windows Phone sales to date!
Android version 1.6 is barely over two years old. In most countries users buy their phones outright upfront, so they tend to be a bit more reluctant to keep upgrading.
Angry Birds for example supports 1.5 onwards IIRC. One of the products I work on is a library to be used in other apps, and hence it is the other developers' choice as to version support (and several support 1.x even for new products).
So commercially there is a good case. Technically it isn't too hard, other than requiring testing time and devices. You can set a filter on the API docs and every one is marked with version information. Obviously you are stuck if you require some newer functionality, but usually you can just make the feature optional if the API level is too old.
Here is the doc about how to handle backwards compatibility:
Android version 1.6 is barely over two years old. In most countries users buy their phones outright upfront, so they tend to be a bit more reluctant to keep upgrading.
Angry Birds for example supports 1.5 onwards IIRC. One of the products I work on is a library to be used in other apps, and hence it is the other developers' choice as to version support (and several support 1.x even for new products).
So commercially there is a good case. Technically it isn't too hard, other than requiring testing time and devices. You can set a filter on the API docs and every one is marked with version information. Obviously you are stuck if you require some newer functionality, but usually you can just make the feature optional if the API level is too old.
Here is the doc about how to handle backwards compatibility:
http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/backward-com...
Google supplies a compatibility library that can help bringing some newer APIs to older versions:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/compatibility-library.html
The upcoming version of the Lint tool also makes it easier to detect unexpected API version function usage:
http://tools.android.com/recent/lintapicheck
The development tools for Android are pretty nice, especially compared to the dross from older platforms.