Despite almost a decade since its launch in October 2013 Android KitKat continues to be a well-remembered and fairly well-regarded release a large part of those users who used it at the time. The successor to Android Jelly Bean and predecessor to Android Lollipop, it was the last version of Android in which different versions shared the largest version number, so let’s recall that Android 4, for example, was divided into no less than four “flavors”:

• Android Ice Cream Sandwich, version 4.0 to 4.0.5
• Android Jelly Bean, version 4.1 to 4.3.1
• Android KitKat, version 4.4 to 4.4.4

So, of course, it explains that although it is part of the Android 4 “family”, in fact this was the eleventh major revision of Android. With the arrival of Android 5.0 Lollipop, a big leap in version with a new name is already introduced every year.

The Android KitKat interface is a little surprising today because Google’s design paradigm has evolved in the years since then. However, we have already found the characteristic elements which remain to this day. And when it comes to the news regarding Jelly Bean, we are not talking about a huge evolution full of new features, because Google focused on improving its performance, especially in entry-level devices, although it also came with a significant limitation in relation to USB storage, a move that was partially reversed in Lollipop.

The life cycle designed by Google for Android KitKat was four years, so received updates until October 2017. Since then, of course, Android 4.4 has ceased to be a secure operating system, but even so, it took almost seven years for its market share to decrease from 1%. In other words, almost 1 in 100 Android devices are still running Android 4.4.

Although Google ended its life cycle a few years ago, the truth is that the veteran operating system still has the necessary support to access the company’s services. However, that will soon come to an end because, as we can read on the official developer blog, Android KitKat will lose access to Google services from August. To be more precise and as we can read in the publication, » KitKat devices will not receive APK versions from Play Services after 23.30.99«.

These types of support withdrawals are common with both Google and Apple and can be seen as a shift to prevent security issues caused by using old operating systems, which is fine, but we can also interpret them as another push in terms of planned obsolescencewhich is no longer so defensible.

What do you think? Do you think they are doing this for security or the main reason is to push their users to buy a new device?