There are still people in parts of the world who use Android Market on Android 2.1

By Florence Ion
last updated

Do you remember using the Android Market (opens in new tab) to download apps for your smartphone? Google announced that it will cease support for the relic app on Eclair devices at the end of June.

In the Android Developers Blog, Google's Maximilian Ruppaner writes:

On June 30, 2017, Google will be ending support for the Android Market app on Android 2.1 Eclair and older devices. When this change happens, users on these devices will no longer be able to access, or install other apps from, the Android Market. The change will happen without a notification on the device, due to technical restrictions in the original Android Market app.

The news is hardly revelatory. Developers don't support Eclair, anyway, since it's so old. Many other third-party app makers have also ceased support in the last few years, focusing instead on maintaining support for Android 2.3 Gingerbread and up. But there are still people out there using smartphones from that era, either because they can't afford to purchase a new device or because that's all they've had access to. Granted, the Android Platform Version numbers don't include the tally of users still on Eclair — or Froyo, for that matter — but the heavily worded blog post seems to suggest that it was published as a warning to the stray few.

Anyway, consider the rest of the month your chance to mourn the past and look ahead to new beginnings.

Florence Ion
Florence Ion

Florence Ion was formerly an editor and columnist at Android Central. She writes about Android-powered devices of all types and explores their usefulness in her everyday life. You can follow her on Twitter or watch her Tuesday nights on All About Android.

28 Comments
  • Android market Wow! And I remember when Google renamed it Google play, I so didn't like it. But it sounds better than android market for sure
  • I don't recall if I cut my teeth on eclair or froyo. Droid X was my first Android.
  • Me with donuts and eclairs, loading roms in Windows mobile.
  • End of an era
  • Yep that's what my original galaxy s (1) had
  • Love the avi. EMAW!
  • They still use it because it's still a better name than "play". Sorry, I've always hated the "play" moniker. And Hangouts. What a stupid name.
  • "Play" grew on me once Play services branched out far beyond just the app marketplace. Hangouts always was and always will be a stupid name, though.
  • This exactly
  • I like the name hangouts, but it sounds like something other than what it is. I've only used hangouts for group video chat for business purposes, and it just didn't seem right.
  • I actually think Hangouts is a good name for an app that primarily does video (especially group video) chat, but not for an app that is primarily used for text chat like Hangouts really is. Hindsight is obviously 20/20, but I think if they'd just stuck to the name Google Talk, they could have avoided the branding and mind share nightmare that Hangouts ended up being. I still frequently hear people refer to Hangouts as Gchat, for god's sake.
  • Hangouts is not a bad name, at least it makes sense, you get together and hang out, Whatsapp makes no sense. Hangouts does not sound businessy. Which I always found odd because hangouts never seemed like it was meant for the average consumer but for more official businesses. When it actually received messages.
    Android market sounds better but Play Store is more consumer friendly sounding.
  • My first was a huwaei ascend, right after froyo came out. I cut my root teeth on that. I was already building my own pcs, and modding my first android intrigued me. Bullet of a phone, took everything in stride( only bootlooped twice). My current phone? Huawei honor, just as tough.
  • I remember my G1 fondly. I stopped rooting when I bought the gen 1 Moto x. I found that as my career progressed I had less and less time to tinker with a phone.
  • And as features were added to Android, rooting became less and less important. I think the last phone I rooted was my Nexus 5, and that was more out of habit than to get any features I needed that Kit Kat didn't have.
  • Totally agreed.
  • I don't think that many people got in on Android that early.
  • The people currently using the 2.1 devices probably didn't, but old phones find their way to poor and developing markets. That may explain a lot of the still-active devices.
  • I had a Froyo device from LG, can't remember the name of it. Replaced it with a G2X, and have known the names of my phones since.
  • I'm betting most of those devices are ones that people held onto and use for things like streaming music or entertainment for their young kids at home. Not as 'daily drivers'. We have a first gen iPad we use pretty much exclusively for Netflix. As long as it functions, there's no reason to toss it.
  • Exactly. My alarm clock is a five-year-old Nexus 7. As long as it can run Timely and Google Play Music, it'll stay by my bed and connected to WiFi.
  • Unbelievable!! and some people say that Android phones work for 2 years and then they stop working. I still have a working Samsung Galaxy Captivate, but I don't use it.
  • I loved my Captivate. Wish still had it.
  • I have a very old Android phone, circa 2010, that just sits on my treadmill connected to an external speaker. Works just fine via wifi and has an old version of Android. It only has the apps that came with it and the only app I use is Play music. So, the version of Android is old. So what? My wife has an iPad 1 that she only uses to play movies. I think it has iOS 4, maybe 5, that can't be updated. So what? Why do people obsess themselves with this nonsense?
  • My very first Android device was a Motorola Droid (End of 2009) which came with Eclair (2.0) followed by the still awesome Droid Incredible which came with 2.1. I still have them both and they still work :)
  • My first was the Samsung Moment, with Cupcake, but soon updated to Cupcake. Loved that slide out keyboard.
  • The carrier I work for, Southern Linc, still has many active users of the iDEN smartphones Motorola Titanium, i867, and even the i1. People still use them long as they work. We don't have but one feature phone to offer right now that's new. They'll be shutting down their iDEN next year to finally go to LTE.
  • My first Android phone was the HTC Droid Incredible. Man, the memories! That phone was a beast. I still have it, too. I upgraded to the Galaxy S III and now I have the Galaxy Note Edge. Today, a phone with a 3.7 inch screen has "mid-range" written all over it. But that was a flagship phone on Verizon for quite a time. Until the Droid X was released a few weeks after that. That was 4.3 inches and considered too big a screen. Ha!