Proposal: switch the min supported values to iOS 10 and android 5

[shankari]

This is not going to happen any time soon, but I wanted to give users some time to weigh in on the change. I really think we should switch the minSupported values to iOS 10 and android 5.

Both iOS 9 and android 4.4 are really old and are beginning to be unsupported by the plugins that we use. Concretely:

• android 4.4 does not support an updateable WebView, so we have to build and release versions with crosswalk embedded
• the most recent version of the deploy and notification plugins support only iOS10+ And when I try to use the older versions, I run into weird issues with cordova (e.g. Push notifications not received in iOS debug builds #437 (comment)). I can keep hacking these changes for a bit, but it is painful and time-consuming and is likely to grow worse with time.

This mainly affects users who use emTripLog @deepalics0044 @asiripanich @myaman17 @uwtcat since people who build their own versions of the app can continue to use the old versions in their forks. However, they will then need to maintain these old versions of the plugins as long as they need to support the compatibility :)

Thoughts?

[shankari]

iOS 11 and iOS 12 are currently on 96% of devices. Everything before that (iOS 10, iOS 9...) is 4% as of today.
https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store/

[shankari]

Android versions before 5.0 are on around 10% of devices
https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/

[DO3B]

Hi @shankari,

While publishing the app on the PlayStore, Google warned us that in August 2019 the target API for publishing new apps must be the API 28 and in November 2019, if we want to update our app, we must also meet this requirement (https://developer.android.com/distribute/best-practices/develop/target-sdk). As for iOS, with their last version, I heard that if we want to publish an app using a third party logins, we might be forced to integrate Sign In with Apple as well.

[shankari]

@DO3B we went through the targetSDK upgrade process (to API 26) fairly recently #325
That was a pretty complicated change since we needed to support both migration to foreground services AND dynamic permissions. The upgrade to API 28 should be easier, and, by making android more similar to iOS in terms of "when in use" versus "always" permissions, might make it easier to change the onboarding to clarify the options to choose.

However, this bug is not about the targetSDK, but the minSDK. The current target API is 26, but users can install in even on android 4.4 (e.g. Samsung Nexus S, ~ 10 year old phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_S). I would like to increase the minSDK to only support android 5.0 (lollipop+)

[shankari]

I also see the news on apple rumor sites around "Sign in with Apple" being mandatory. Assuming that they also use OAuth/OpenIDConnect, it should be pretty easy to support it. The main substantial change will involve supporting two authentication methods (e.g. both your own keystone server and apple) instead of only one.

Again, this bug is about dropping support for iOS9, maybe concomitantly with adding support for iOS13?