Unexpected decrease in number of supported Android devices

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

I have a fairly mature game app (com.AngelsIncGames.CardSequenceFree) which up to release 12 had a very stable, growing user acquisition rate. Release 12 and earlier were built using Unity Editor 2019.4.29f1 but at Release 13 I changed to the Unity Editor 2021.3.4f1 primarily so that I could use a more up-to-date version of the Unity Advertising SDK.

Looking at data in the Play Console, I notice that the acquisition rate for the game reduced just at the time I released Release 13, even though there are no changes in the game functionality. I’ve also noticed that the number of supported Android devices reduced from 14869 at release 12 to 14002 at release 13 and later, and I am wondering if that caused the reduction in acquisition rate.

I have looked at the details for App bundle 13 (1.0.10) and App bundle 12 (1.0.9) as shown in the Play Console and I can see the following differences (In both cases they target API 30 and 177 countries).

Supported Android Devices 12: 14869 13: 14002
Localisations 12: None 13: 85
Permissions 12: 4 13: 6 (13 has additional permissions of RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED and WAKE_LOCK)
API Levels 12: 19+ 13: 22+

I have also looked at the build settings in the Unity Editor, and I can see two differences:

Minimum API Level 12: 19 13: 22
API Compatibility: 12: NET Standard 2.0 13: NET Standard 2.1

When moving from release 12 to 13, I did not intentionally make any changes to the build settings which might cause the differences in the builds listed above. They seem to have arisen due to the change in Editor version.( Note that the 2021 version of the editor does not let me set the Minimum API Level and NET API Compatibility back to the what they were in the 2019 editor)

Can anyone please advise if these two differences in Editor build settings are likely to be causing the reduction in the number of supported Android devices, and if so is there anything I can do to restore the original number of devices?

Regards

Dave

2

I’m quite sure it’s the minimum API level. Can you manually select a lower value in 2021 or not?
API 22 is android 5.1, which is from 2014.

Do you also see a decline in your new user base? Because over 97% of actual users will still be supported.

3

Thanks DevDunk,

You are right, it definitely is the minimum SDK level which caused the reduction in number of supported devices. However I’m still doubtful this is what caused the change in my acquisition rate. I will explain this below.

To prove that the number of supported devices has decreased due to the minimum API, I downloaded the full Device Catalog via Google Play, and within Excel excluded the devices that my app has never targetted (e.g, TV, wearables and devices which don’t support Open GL3+). This excluded several thousand devices straight away. When I then also excluded APIs, 19, 20 and 21 also, the number left decreased by a further 867 which is exactly the reduction that I saw between my two releases.

Regarding my user base, the actual number of users and devices is still going up, its the rate at which its going up that decreased between the two releases. I don’t think this reduction is due to losing the API 19 to 21 devices as 95% of my downloads are to devices running Android v10 or above so a decrease in the very old Android version users would be lost in the noise. Also I have looked at the acquisition rate for my app filtered for the latest Android versions 10 to 13 and its clear that there is the same trend of reduction for these users even though they are still supported by the new release.

So I’m still mystified why the decrease in rate has happened. Perhaps its just that I’ve saturated the market for my app?

Regards

Dave