Cleaning in casa Android. Google has in fact announced that access to the personal account, or to accounts if you have multiple profiles, will no longer be possible from devices stopped at version 2.3.7 (or earlier) of the Mountain View operating system. This is, to resort to commercial terms, the last act of Gingerbread, the seventh edition of the platform dating back to really many years ago: it was in fact launched in 2010. The previous versions are Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and Froy in addition to Android 1.0.
The date to be marked, for those who still have an old tablet or mobile phone used as a backup, is the September 27, 2021.
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The decision obviously concerns cybersecurity issues: “As part of ongoing efforts to protect our users, Google will no longer allow access on Android devices running Android 2.3.7 or earlier as of September 27, 2021 – reads on a page of the Android Help portal, signed by community manager Zak Pollack -. If you log into your device after September 27, you will receive a username or password error warning when trying to use Google products and services such as Gmail, YouTube and Maps. “
In short, you will be cut off from the rich Google ecosystem, which goes from maps to documents, from e-mail to translations up to the same access to the Play Store and therefore to the infinite number of applications.
In reality, for those who really do not want to update a system that is more than a decade old which nevertheless remains in history for various innovations (above all the support for NFC proximity technology with which today, for example, we pay in shops with the phone), all is not lost: some services, such as Gmail, will be accessible but only through any browser, with the same account details. Which in fact will therefore remain partially operational. Devices that can be upgraded to the next version of the operating system, the 3.0 Honeycomb of 2011, of course, will continue to guarantee access to all Google features and suites.
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But how many tablets and phones are still equipped with version 2.3.7? Not many, presumably, even if for some years now Android no longer spreads the market shares of the various releases very precisely. Three years ago, in May 2019, Gingerbread was installed on 0.3% of active devices out of the more than three billion worldwide. Little? Perhaps. It was still about nearly 8 million smartphones and tablets.
By April 2020, however, the share had dropped to 0.1%. However, it is to be imagined that Google will begin to phase out support for older versions with ever greater speed. At least comparable to the one with which it is launching the new platforms: Android 11 was released in September 2020 while the 12 edition is already available in beta.
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