This bit of news and announcement concerns me as i been hoarding an old Huawei Mate from Jellybean to Marshmallow and see it's time to get caught up on the best Android offers with the Tablet. I must say IOS have their base but Android is been the toughest. longest lasting and most durable system i could ever hoped for. I do believe my Mate 2 by now is what, 10 years? That's some MASSIVE endurance for those of us who don't jump every year to buy the newest releases. Or latest updates for that matter.
The second tablet I purchased in 2016 was a Samsung Tab, it is 32-bit but to this day I stream movies and sports, stream music via Spotify and watch YouTube all perfectly well. I would be a shame to render it obsolete just because of software requirements rather than a final hardware failure. Looking at today's prices for good quality tablets they still run into the hundreds, not bad when you read reports the Android tablet market is dying off.
I don't see any mention of removing 32bit version of apps from Play Store. It is just an rumour that Google is preparing 64 bit only version of OS/firmware for this particular model of tablet, so you can't use apps with 32 bit only native code on this particular model of tablet. And most Android apps are written in Java or Kotlin so it does not affect them.
But will creators of apps drop support for 32-bit apps similar to software becoming unsupported on older versions of Windows. The few makers of Android tablets left all now support 64-bit hardware so I wouldn't be surprised if apps followed suit.
It is an option. I mean it wouldn't make sense for Google to force companies to support both 32 bit and 64 bit versions in the long run. Anyway it will take time and it will only affect none-pure-Java nor Kotlin applications. panta rhei
