Android 4.4 KitKat is really dead, losing Play Services support – Ars Technica

The Android ecosystem gets a lot of slack for its inability to offer everyone OS updates in a timely manner, but there’s more to Android updates than just OS support. App updates can keep the phone working even after updates stop, and Google’s do-it-all app, Google Play Services, has a plethora of app-specific APIs and features and enables really important things like Play Store transactions and ads.

Google just announced that Play Services is dropping support for an older version of Android, and while development of the operating system may have stalled at just three or four years, Play Services has been back for much longer than that. Google announce Play Services is dropping support for Android 4.4 KitKat, which is now 10 years old. Support is not cut artificially either. Google says the number of active KitKat devices is “less than 1 percent,” so there isn’t much reason to support it anymore.

These devices will stop receiving Play Services updates after July, after which it’s anyone’s guess how long that will last. At some point, Google will change something, and your device will become a brick. Older, unsupported Android devices can’t sign in to a Google account, which is a prerequisite for opening half of the apps that came with your phone. You will be locked out of the Play Store, Gmail, Google Maps, and other Google products, with no way to see those old versions again. Luckily , Somebody I saw all of this coming and took screenshots of every old version.

Besides killing 10-year-old phones, this is also the first shutdown that will remove early Android clocks, which also launched with KitKat. If you already have anything old that you’re still using, it’s time to upgrade.