What all advantages I can get by increasing minSdk

Question

We have an app on playstore with minSdk version as 15 and we have less than 0.7% active users on api 18 and below. So we were planning to increase our minSdk version to 19. I tried incrementing the minSdk version to 19 and it helped us in reducing apk size by 650KBs approximately in resurces (Current APK size 24MB). I thought by doing this we should be able to decrease method count also because of lesser backporting of support libs. Am I missing something? What all benefits I will get by increasing minSdk other than reduced apk size and ease of testing?

Answer 1

I can think of few:

1. Lossless WebP support (API 19).
2. No need to use left/ right along with start/end in xml layouts (API 17).
3. Chromium based WebView (API 19).
4. LayoutTransition.enableTransitionType() (API 16) - to animate when anything in the container changes the layout.
5. More font families - Roboto Light, Roboto Condensed (API 16).
6. Java 7 try-with-resources (API 19). From Android Studio 3.0, this is available for all API levels.

You can find more here:

https://github.com/kaushikgopal/why_bump_android_minsdk

In the Create New Project wizard in Android Studio, you can click on 'Help me choose' under Minimum SDK to view this: