Maintaining an Android app is a lot of work

“Google Ads library v24 dropped support for Android API 21. According to official Google statistics, API 21 is used by 0.1% (~4 million) users.”

ExoPlayer broke compatibility twice, Compose does not work from Java, and Google’s own auth library broke sign-in on older Android for months. API 36 removed the edge-to-edge opt-out that API 35 offered. New apps must hand their signing keys to Google. Hobby developers absorb Google’s churn for free.