Should I downgrade to Ionic V1 to support Android 4.2

I hate the idea of losing potential customers - but with my Ionic 3 app finally out for testing one user cannot use it on their samsung galaxy tab 4 (less than 3 years old) which runs Android 4.22 and Ionic 3 requires Android 5.

No problem - just install Android 5 on the tablet - but after hours of looking there is no update available.

As I said above I hate the idea of losing potential customers - so what do you think - take my Ionic 3 app and reproduce it in V1 - is that possible? or is it plain stupid? Also I assume v1 supports Android 4.2.

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I wouldn’t downgrade to V1, since you might use plugins wich are only supported for v3.
People will adapt to newer Phones anyway. Since most of their apps they are using won’t be able to run on their platforms anymore. Don’t worry to much about losing a customer.

What you could do is you bring out 2 versions to the Playstore one wich runs on the older devices and one for the newer ones. The downside is that you will have to patch 2 versions all the time and you have to know the old version of angular and the new one ofc, much more work for you etc…

In your case I would stay with Ionic 3. Like I said your customers will adapt since they are using many more applications wich they love and use on a daily base. If their Android version won’t be patched anymore they most likely buy a new one.

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have you installed Crosswalk?

That has always been my attitude - but the more I think about it the more it worries me - won’t people post negative review saying it does not work.

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I have seen lots of posts about the problems with Crosswalk but never took any notice as it seemed to be a V1 issue. Hate to say it but I do not know what it does.

If you have problems with Android 4.x users limit the Android support for +5.1 devices in your config.xml

<preference name="android-minSdkVersion" value="22"/>

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Sorry to be totally ignorant - does that mean the app won’t download from the play store if called from an Android 4 device - or does it show a warning message if Android is less than 5.0?

The store will show a message saying “Your device is not compatible with this version”

it would be tough to do with ionic 1 . same situation i am facing as i am from India where lot of end users are having kitkat and jealybean

Install via npm if you want to support Android 4.x. Adds about 20mb to your app… No longer supported, so don’t use it unless you need to support those old phones.

I thought I had a similar problem with me. My application works on mobile devices, but not on tablets. Because this tablet has 4x android version