Google Calendar plays an important role in managing your everyday life. Creating events, meeting scheduled and creating tasks are some the features that people use on daily basis. It's all good but if you use Google Calendar app on Android devices running Android nougat (7.1) and below, I have a bad news for such users. Recently I shared about Google Chrome dropping support for Android nougat as well starting with version 120 in December.
I noticed this change when I found a flag in Google Calendar - UnsupportedOperatingSystem__enabled, they also added an activity for it. Initially I was not sure why they added this flag but my first guess was that it will show this screen for the unsupported operating systems. Calling it Unsupported Operating System was kinda weird, it could have been more clear with Unsupported Android Version because the APK is supposed to run on Android device and not some other Operating System.
I ignored this whole thing after that but on November 22, apkmirror shared a new version of Google Calendar 2023.46.0-581792699-release, and the minimum supported version for this version is Android Oreo (8.0). After noticing it, I looked at the old versions of Google Calendar on apkmirror and they all have minimum Android 5.0 (lollipop) version support. You can check the version history and minimum supported Android version on Apkmirror by clicking here. Google provides only an apk and a bundled apks for all supported Android devices/versions. That flag now made some sense and it became clear that Google Calendar will now support Android Oreo and above only. Here is the screen that Google Calendar users will see once they drop support for mentioned Android Versions -
The flag was added in a previous version of Google Calendar which was published on November 5 on apkmirror. So Google may flip the flag for users running Android 7.1 and below on the old version of Google Calendar whenever Google wants. It is possible that Google may post some information about it in coming weeks. So this is just a big guess based on the evidences which I found. In my testing, when I enabled this flag, the unsupported OS screen showed up just after launching the app and I was not able to dismiss it, it won't let you reach the main calendar screen. Not sure if this is intended behaviour or it could be changed in future.
We may see Google dropping support for older Android version for more apps as these older Android version are vulnerable to hacks and data loss with older kernels and security patches.
For more such news and other Google app feature leaks you can follow me on Twitter/X or join my telegram channel - Gapps Flags & Leaks.
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