And for the few who do understand why…it just comes across as fundamentally lazy. There’s a number inside Google that shows how many apps are available for each SDK. This change makes that number go down for old versions. But that number is irrelevant! This was to stop harm.

We have existing mechanisms to remove malware from the Play Store. This is nothing new! Old apps which exhibit bad behavior can be removed selectively. Apps that use problematic APIs do so because Android allows them to. That can stop being the case! Why was this not scoped?

I *know* this is more work. I really do. But you have to do it. Look, I’m sorry I didn’t mention this to you all when I was at Google. I’m telling you know, and I hope you undo this before someone sideloads something they shouldn’t have. I was waiting for an example to show…