Changes in supported platforms in 2026/2027?

[JeromeMartinez]

It becomes hard to keep compatibility with old platforms, due to compilers, third party libraires and so on.

Planned changes:

• Windows 7-8.1: EOL 2020~2023, <1% market share, block MSVC2026 deployment, Firefox stops it too in 2026-08
• macOS 10.10-10.11: EOL 2017~?, < 1% market share, more and more difficult to upload on Mac App Store
• Android 5-6: <1% market share, Google stopped to support Android 5, WhatsApp stops it too in 2026-09, third party libraries, and as we are there let's do it for Android 6 too in 1 shot for coherency with the future lib (large file support in Android 7 only), Google Pay Services stopped on Android 6.

Maybe in 2026-08? or 2027-01?

For reference, we stopped the support of older platforms with this timeline:

• 2025-08: Android 4.4
• 2024-06: RHEL/CentOS 7, SLE 12, Debian 10, Mageia 8
• 2021-03: Windows XP, macOS 10.5-10.9, RHEL/CentOS 6

[cjee21]

For reference, we stopped the support of older platforms with this timeline:

• 2025-08 (25.09) Android 4.4 for official GUI app

Android library requires Android 7 due to large file support.

MediaInfoLib/Release/Release_DLL_Android.sh

Line 26 in d5a767b

MINSDKVERSION=24 # Android 7.0 needed for -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64

[JeromeMartinez]

2025-08 (25.09) Android 4.4 for official GUI app

I always forget it, I added MediaArea/MediaArea-Website#620 for the website and updated the text above.

Android library requires Android 7 due to large file support.

This one is a technical limitation but does not impact our releases IIUC (using by buffer interface).
There will be a difference of support between GUI and Lib if we decide to publish AAR or any lib with large file support, vs our GUI release with Android 6 support (still ~2% of users), but it should be fine as there is currently no official lib release, we'll just indicate it as having support only from Android 7.

[JeromeMartinez]

Hum, checking our stats rather than global stats, Android 6 MediaInfo users are... ~0.1%, actually there was a big drop in 2025, looks like that I am too conservative here. Very few Android 7/7.1 users too so I would be open to drop that too now but we could keep them if no need to drop it due to third party libraries being even more conservative than me now.
Updated the ticket with potential drop of Android 5 & 6 in 1 shot.

[cjee21]

Have you checked Windows statistics?

#2370 (comment)

[JeromeMartinez]

Have you checked Windows statistics?

Unfortunately I have no concrete stats from the software directly (we count how many users we have daily, optionally split by software version, that is all, but it would be useful to have a split by OS version), we have only stats from the website (which can be spammed by robots indicating a fake OS version), which gives ~5% of Windows 7-8.1 users. I think it is less in practice, we should add something about OS version in the anonymous stats for being sure...

[JeromeMartinez]

#2370 (comment)

I forgot to address that, I'll check.

[cjee21]

#2370 (comment)

I forgot to address that, I'll check.

I copied the link slightly wrong. Should be linking to comment below it: #2370 (comment)

[cjee21]

To reduce risk of DLL preloading attacks, we can do something like the following but it only works on Windows Vista/7 with KB2533623 installed.

libcurl_Module=LoadLibraryEx(__T("libcurl.dll"), NULL, LOAD_LIBRARY_SEARCH_DEFAULT_DIRS);

[cjee21]

Google dropped another version from Play Services support...

Google Play services are only supported on devices with Android 7.0 (API level 24) and up.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/9037938?hl=en