Question

My question pertains to possible issues that I may encounter if I upgrade to JellyBean. I am currently developing my app to run on Ice Cream Sandwich, but that upgrade notification is starting to annoy me, plus I really want 4.1. But I am still developing the app and still learning android development. Should developers always develop their app on the target API level? Do experienced developers believe I should stick to ICS until I am done? Also, has anyone encountered any quirks when running there apps on Jelly Bean. I appreciate any advice I can get on this matter as it will obviously help me understand best practices in these cases.

Answer 1

The difference between 4.1 and 4.0 is not at all significant, so I say go for it. Jelly Bean is really awesome, especially on the Galaxy Nexus! Plus, you can keep your targetSdkVersion set to 14 or 15 and the phone will know that it doesn’t need to load any of the new API 16 methods when the app is run.

The only thing that comes to mind is that Jelly Bean will not allow you to read the logs of other applications (although there were probably other security mechanisms put in place as well). Overall, unless your app is doing something really weird/hackish, I would be very surprised if your application ran correctly on 4.1 but not on 4.0. If you were upgrading from 2.3 to 4.0, my answer would probably be the opposite since GB and ICS are so incredibly different… 4.0 and 4.1 on the other hand are quite similar.