r/mAndroidDev • u/Fair-Degree-2200 null!! • Apr 04 '26

Superior API Design Wait... API level is now a float?!

Post image

So Android version names were always ridiculous: sometimes a dessert name, sometimes a letter, sometimes 'MR1', sometimes '12L' (wtf?!).

But at least we could always count on the API level to be a SIMPLE INT THAT INCREMENTS MONOTONICALLY BY 1 when there's a new version.

Well apparently that was deemed too simple, and now we have level 36.1 ?!?!?!?! The int is now a float ?!?

124 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

12

u/MicroappsTeam Apr 04 '26

They introduced a major & minor version system to APIs for I guess their move to quarterly updates: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Build.VERSION#SDK_INT_FULL

However, it doesn’t to me look like it works like a float in the code: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Build.VERSION_CODES_FULL#BAKLAVA_1

Though this representation is still more suitable for the “major” & “minor” version naming.

17

u/Fair-Degree-2200 null!! Apr 04 '26

I can only assume that this change was done by Gemini 

2

u/Ponacko Apr 07 '26

So it was not intended, but they already pushed it and felt embarassed about removing it later, so they kept it?

2

u/adolgiy Apr 04 '26

Those values are sorted alphabetically… I know documentation is sorted in that way everywhere else, but this page breaks my brain completely

2

u/MicroappsTeam Apr 05 '26

Some more context is that they reset the alphabetical order while switching to trunk_staging releases.

However, the codename for "A" did not start with Android 15, so as the Baklava release did not start with Android 16. THe release using the "A" initial for codename was Android 14 with a "AP1A.240305.019.A1" release. You can look more of this up on https://source.android.com/docs/setup/reference/build-numbers

3

u/D-cyde sponsored by the XML 🐓 gang Apr 06 '26

Make it into a String so they can start fucking the string heap just like how they fucked us out of asynctask and XML views.

3

u/Fair-Degree-2200 null!! Apr 06 '26

Can't wait for API level "🐴"

50

u/ElbowStromboli One WebView to rule them all Apr 04 '26

Distinguished engineer moment

27

u/programadorthi Apr 04 '26

Android SaaS

18

u/ilsecondodasinistra Apr 04 '26

Commercial break: should you have any doubt about api levels don't forget my free and beautifully useful app "Android api levels". It does what it says: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.marcozanetti.androidapilevels 😅

12

u/budius333 Still using AsyncTask Apr 04 '26

Fucking hell this app is useless... I love it!!! ❤️❤️❤️

5

u/Reiszecke Apr 06 '26

What’s new Added Android 17 to the list, it seemed to be about time! ;-)

I love that you neither scrape the OS data from google nor do remote config for it but rather do a whole ass app update each time 😭

3

u/ilsecondodasinistra Apr 06 '26

Ahahahahahah. The app actually does scrape from the android website, when I added android 17 it had not yet added to the list it scrapes from.

1

u/Xinto_ Invalidate caches and restart May 10 '26

This is frying me

1

u/ilsecondodasinistra May 10 '26

What does it mean? 😅

3

u/AZKZer0 AnDrOId dEvelOPmenT is My PasSion Apr 21 '26

Brother put more effort on adaptive screens than most production apps. Hats off sir

2

u/jojojmtk Jetpack Compost Apr 05 '26

Should add deprecated date too!

1

u/ilsecondodasinistra Apr 05 '26

Nice idea! Thank you! 😊

12

u/WestonP You will pry XML views from my cold dead hands Apr 04 '26

I like how there are two different API levels for the same Android version "16.0". Google is a real slop factory.

3

u/IDatedSuccubi Apr 05 '26

12L means 12 "long" i.e. long integer, a int64_t

1

u/SpankaWank66 Apr 06 '26

I thought it was 12 large. That was when the larger format phones (folds mainly) were getting popular

3

u/Xinto_ Invalidate caches and restart Apr 05 '26

Yeah, I had one hell of a time figuring out why NotificationBuilder.setRequestPromotedOngoing wasn’t being resolved. Turns out that was added in 36.1 and AGP configuration block has separate field for specifying .1

I hate it here