Google’s Extension SDK aims to bring latest features to older Android versions

[harlan4096]

Fragmentation has been a longstanding complaint about the Android ecosystem. Often users miss out on features of the latest Android version because they are using older devices that are no longer updated. To reduce the gap, Google has released the first public version of the Extension SDK, which aims to bring features of the latest Android version to older iterations.

As a part of this announcement, Google is opening up Photo Picker API support to Android 11 and Android 12. Photo picker lets users give access to select photos from their library to an app — right now, only Android 13 users can use the latest photo picker interface.

Notably, as this is an SDK app developers will have to include this functionality in their apps. But users won’t need a system update to use the photo picker.

Google: Extending the Android SDK

Android 10 and higher support Modular System Components that allow us to expedite functional and security updates to the Android ecosystem outside of major API level releases and make new functionality backward compatible on already-released Android versions. These improvements help make development more flexible and broaden the reach for app developers. We've built a new Extension SDK framework for you to integrate with these APIs, and today, we’re releasing the first public version of the Extension SDK (Extension Level 4).