According to Google, it is now time to take the Android 4.0 to the museum as a relic. The company announced today that they will be stopping Play Support for the mobile operating system.
That means updates for apps on devices running Android 4.0 will be few (if any) and far between. Google is, therefore, hence giving a directive to developers to targets API level (Android 4.1 Jelly Bean) or later versions. Though technically, developers may decide to continue issuing updates for the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, since it is a directive from Google, I highly doubt they will be many.
So just how many people out there still using Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
According to stats released by Google’s developer dashboard, as of October 26, 2018, there were 0.03% Android users running the Android 4.0 on their devices. As a percentage, it may seem like less than a handful of people until you realize that the 0.03% actually represent about 6 million users.
The sad thing is, and this is something that has been bedeviling Android from time immemorial, OEM hardly ever pushes out stock Android upgrades. That means users still using Ice Cream Sandwich have no way of upgrading the stock Android, and if they want to use a version of the mobile OS still supported by Google. They will have to buy a completely new device running a later version of the OS out of the box.