Google Officially Suspends Support for Android Lollipop After a Decade

What do you want to know?

• Google will end official support for the Android Lollipop operating system, which debuted with the Nexus 6.
• Also known as Android 5.0, it was widely used to introduce Material You to Android devices.
• The operating system in question will no longer receive updates from Google Play, as less than one percent of active devices are running it.

If you’re an early Nexus 6 owner, you probably first encountered Android Lollipop, and it’s been a shocking ten years since then. Google first introduced it in November 2014, and now official support is ending.

As 9to5Google points out, Google will be stopping Google Play Services updates on Android Lollipop devices starting this month. According to a Google spokesperson’s statement to the publication, the reason for stopping this is the percentage of active Android Lollipop devices, which is said to be less than one percent at present. This is a tradition that Google has followed for its previous versions of Android.

For example, the previous version of Lollipop, Android KitKat, which was released 11 years ago, also had less than one percent of active devices as of last July. Google has chosen to stop releasing Google Play Services. This year seems to be no different, as more and more Android phones are eagerly awaiting the Android 15 update, which will likely come after the Made by Google event on August 13.

Those wondering whether Android Lollipop devices will lose support for Google Play Services will continue to wonder whether or not they will. Yes, they will. Users will simply receive “no new features, no important security updates, and some apps may not be compatible.”

The latter has already been the case with most sensitive apps, like banking apps and popular social media apps, as they only support the previous three or four iterations of Android versions.

However, Android Lollipop, aka Android 5.0, was special for Google because it first introduced Material You in 2014 on its popular Nexus devices, followed by a nifty update dubbed Android 5.1 the following year.

As 9to5 notes, dropping official support simply means that Google will prioritize the latest devices and upcoming operating systems, like Android 15. With Lollipop out of the running, Marshmallow phones will likely be next in line.