Update minimum API level (2024)

[mhsmith]

When deciding whether to desupport old API levels, use the Google Play statistics from the Android Studio new project wizard. The code which downloads the data is at tools/adt/idea/android/src/com/android/tools/idea/stats/DistributionService.java, and the URL it downloads is https://dl.google.com/android/studio/metadata/distributions.json. However, this has been updated irregularly in the past.

Checklist in product/gradle-plugin/README.md.

Relevant changes:

• 23:
  • Dynamic linker improvements. This will allow many workarounds to be removed from the importer, plus the dynload_shlib patch (see #980).
  • TestAndroidOutput fails to read logcat on ARM64 emulator, API levels 21-22 #771
• 24:
  • Large file support on 32-bit platforms. This should allow us to remove lfs.patch – though note we only support 32-bit platforms with Python 3.11 and older.
  • Java 8 interface default and static methods can't be called from Python on Android when minSdk < 24 #1204
  • Extension modules fail to load on API level 23 #1139

[mhsmith]

distributions.json (with a Last-Modified header of 02 Jun 2023), now shows API level 23 with 97.5% support, so we can move to that now.

[mhsmith]

distributions.json (with a Last-Modified header of 15 May 2024), shows API level 24 with 97.4% support, so we can move to that now.