Xamarin Mobile Development for Android Cookbook

Supporting previous Android versions

As the Android operating system evolves, many new features are added and older devices are often left behind.

How to do it...

In order to add the new features of the later versions of Android to the older versions of Android, all we need to do is add a small package:

1. An Android app has three platform versions to be set. The first is the API features that are available to code against. We set this to always be the latest in the Target Framework dropdown of the project options.
2. The next version to set (via Minimum Android version) is the lowest version of the OS that the app can be installed on. When using the support libraries, we can usually target versions down to version 2.3.
3. Lastly, the Target Android version ...