There’s some bad news for you, if you happen to have your Android device running on an old software version. The team over at the XDA developers did some digging, and they’ve found out some very interesting news, regarding the Chrome Android app. It has been found out that in the very near future, Chrome will no longer be able to support older versions of Android – as old as the jelly bean. So what this basically means is that Chrome will no longer be able to support Android devices running jelly bean.
With the current specifications in mind, Google Chrome can be downloaded right from the play store, on any device which has the presence of Android 4.1, or a newer software version to that. However, now, with the latest news on mind, only devices which run the Android 4.4 KitKat, or newer, will be able to support Chrome.
Now, you might misinterpret the news item. What the new disclosure means is that devices running Android jelly bean will no longer have the ability to update the Chrome browser from the play store, however, the devices will still be able to access the Chrome browser. They’ll just happen to be running an older version, and hence they users of the devices will have to make do by using the older version.
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Although this news won’t be of any concern to many, because the vast majority of the Android users do happen to be using devices which run on KitKat or later, and while this is without doubt true, it is also true that there are still plenty of devices which run on jelly bean. In fact, with the latest numbers in mind, there are actually 3.2 percent of Android devices which are still running on a version of jelly bean.
Now the percentage might not bother you much – since it’s only 3.2 percent on the total users, however, consider the fact that since there are over one billion Android devices all over the globe, 3.2 percent of a billion account for around 32 million devices. Let’s just digest that – 32 million Android devices won’t be able to run the latest version of Chrome in the very near future!
While it has been revealed that Google will remove the support for the jelly bean devices in the near future, it hasn’t actually be revealed exactly when this is going to take place. However, since there’s already a commit in the Chrome code, it is quite likely that this will happen very soon.
