What’s New¶

Google has issued a new policy for apps submitted to the Play Store:

Starting August 31 2025, app updates must target Android 15 (API level 35) or higher to be submitted to Google Play. Furthermore, existing apps (such as our LionsBase mobile app) must target Android 14 (API level 34) or higher to remain available to new users on devices running Android OS higher than your app’s target API level.

As you see, there is a difference between the compatibility of the app with a given version of Android and the target API level. The compatibility indicates the minimum version of Android that is required to run the app. The target API level indicates the version of Android that the app was developed for. The app may run on later versions of Android, but it may not take advantage of the latest features of the Android OS.

Every new Android version introduces changes that enhance the user experience, security, and performance of the Android platform overall.

To provide Android and Google Play users with a safe experience, Google Play now requires all apps to meet some target API level requirements:

To comply with this new policy, we have updated the target API level of the LionsBase mobile app to API level 35 (Android 15) in two steps:

1. In version 12.0, we updated the target API level from 33 to 34 thanks to the migration to .NET MAUI. Unfortunately, we faced some issues we could not resolve at that time, so we had to delay the update to API level 35 to a later release.

2. In this release, we have updated the target API level to 35 (Android 15) with the switch from .NET v8 to .NET v9, after we verified that all libraries and controls used in the application were compatible with .NET v9 and we found solutions for the issues we faced until now.

This update does not introduce any new features or changes to the user interface. The application remains fully compatible with Android 5.1 and later versions, and it continues to work as expected on all supported devices.

Other Changes¶

In addition, a few bugs have been squashed and minor enhancements integrated:

• a Dutch translation has been corrected;

• various internal libraries have been upgraded.

About the Large Compatibility with Versions of Android¶

As you see, we do our best to keep compatibility with rather old versions of Android (Android 5.1 - Lollipop dates back from March 2015 and this represents a gigantic jump in the past in the IT world).

If we keep such old compatibility (compared to Apple users), this is related to a very unfortunate fact that Android smartphones and tablets are usually maintained much less than Apple ones. In fact, manufacturers such as Samsung are selling their devices with (usually) the latest available version of Android at that time and provide major updates of the system for something that we estimate for about 2 years in contrast to Apple which supports its devices for as long as 6 years. We understand that LionsBase application users do not see any need to get a new device every 2 to 3 years (which is totally legit) and as such, we strive to keep compatibility as long as we can.

As problems arise due to this compatibility and as the number of people still actively using older devices decreases, we may drop support for some older versions at any time.