Question

I just uploaded my first app to the Android marketplace and one comments says, “It force closes on G1”. What version of the Android OS does the G1 use?

Answer 1

Originally the G1 shipped with 1.0, then upgrades were released to update the phone to 1.1, 1.5 (Cupcake) and 1.6 (Donut).

So you would expect most users to be on 1.6. However, there are a couple of extra things you may want to consider.

Firstly, some users will be running custom firmware. A quite a few G1 users – me included – run community firmware on their devices, such as CyanogenMod. Often these releases are 1.6 releases with 2.x functionality ported from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) tree, so you could consider them as a hybrid release, putting the phone somewhere between 1.6 and 2.x. I wouldn’t worry about the people running custom firmware since they are so many different firmwares and builds of each firmware, and people who put custom firmware on their phone usually expect to fend for themselves. I only mention it in case you get some weird bugs you really can’t replicate which might be caused by this.

Secondly, I’d recommend looking at the Android Device Dashboard as this shows what fraction of users of all phones are running each release:

At the time of writing 31% of users are still on Android 1.5 and I would guess quite a few of these are running G1s.

So my advice would be to test your application on 1.5 and 1.6 if you want to support G1 users.