Did you lose access to Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube?
If you weren’t aware, phones and tablets released about 11 years ago and never updated past Android 2.3 lost access to Gmail, Google Maps, and a few other things yesterday. The sweeping action came after … Gingerbread… man I remember Gingerbread… ok, they lost support for Google Maps but more interestingly they HAD support for Google Maps until yesterday.
Several outlets reported that millions of devices would be affected by the shutdown but what really is interesting is that at 11 years (Gingerbread was released Dec 10, 2010,) millions of phones would still be in operation as the batteries back then were not really made to last. I mean we’ve passed the 3G shutdown stage on many carriers already.
I’m actually really interested if this affected anyone. It’s been a SLEWWWW few weeks on the news cycles but this seemed like a nearly non-issue. I’m more worried that Gingerbread still might be out there with all of its security exploits discovered in the past 11 years than I am about Google discontinuing support for something that came out during the days of the Dalvik cache.
[Sun]
