[Technical] What the Android/iOS version support means

Ending Support for Android 4.3.1 and iOS 8

https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/125499/ending-support-for-android-4-3-1-and-ios-8

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I want to talk a little bit about what Kabam's decision to drop support for Android 4.3.1 and iOS 8 are indicative of. This is all speculation but I'll explain the reasoning behind that with facts.

Kabam as a company is looking to maximize reach and income, being as inclusive as possible only benefits their bottom line, dropping support may reduce the testing surface and simplify their processes. I'm trying to be a bit more professional here, but we know their historical take on reliability vs profits. I see no indication that Kabam would intentionally retire this support without other incentive, particularly the iOS support as those devices would be running better than most Androids.

MCoC currently uses Unity 3D version 5.4.6f3. This version is from 2016.

A while ago, I forget which update, Kabam updated to this version, I want to say it was slightly after 12.0, but there was suddenly a bunch of issues with timing in combat - whiffing, and failed linked attacks, champions simply not reaching with attacks - I've talked in the past about how this was caused by the disconnect between Kabam's code and the Unity framework.

Updates to Unity is a big deal for this game - it should require a LOT of testing. There are a lot of risks with breaking things. It would appear that Kabam has been reluctant to make updates to this framework.

Unity versions have minimums for Android and iOS requirements, trawling through release notes is very laborious, so I don't have a good estimate as to the Unity version I suspect they're upgrading to. In addition to the Unity framework version, there are also various features of Unity that may require they re-target the minimum supported OS.

It's possible this is not Unity related at all, there may be features outside of Unity they are looking to enable.

Enough crap, what's this mean?

If the version of Unity is updated we should be prepared for bugs. No other way to put it, historically they just haven't gotten this right.

When you encounter them, lets be civil about it, and provide enough information for them to track this down. They seem to really like to ask for videos, which is a shame because they should be able to reproduce these themselves, but if you'd like a quick resolution, keep that in mind.

Up side, this may be a big performance increase. The new version might come with a lot better support of utilizing hardware in Android devices, I don't have anything concrete about that, but I imagine that the upgrade in Unity version and associated risks were beneficial enough for Kabam to do this, then the benefits outweighed them - and Unity doesn't really offer any new monetization capabilities, so performance (and improved development speed potential in a more modern environment) would be the biggest beneficial factors for this choice.