Unity 4.6.0 - Android development for Gingerbread (2.3.3): Is it possible?

Questions & Answers
1

On the system requirements page on the Unity website it says that Unity games can run on Androids 2.3.1 and up.

http://unity3d.com/unity/system-requirements

I just want to know if it actually is possible or that this page could be outdated.

I am aware that Unity 5 only supports Android devices that support NEON so I remained with Unity 4.6.7.

I set the minimum API level to 10 in the player settings but when I attempted to build the apk file a window popped up saying Unity required a minimum API level of 21. So I went to the Android SDK Manager and installed API 21 (as well as 22 just in case) and the apk was built, but it would not run on my device which was API level 10, I did have API 10 installed from the SDK Manager.

So I exported the project as a Google Android Project and opened it in Android Studio. I tried running the project on two AVDs (Android Virtual Devices), one with an API level of 22 and one with an API level of 10. The 22 ran the app perfectly, but the 10 failed to even start it. I checked the project structure with Android Studio and found that even though I set the minimum API to 10 the target API was still 21.

I am under the assumption that changing the “minimum” API level in Unity does not change the “target” API.

After searching the web and Unity Answers posts I learned that the requirement for API 21 was a “fix” made in the 4.6.1 release.

https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-4.6.1
:“-Android: Updated SDK and JDK requirements to match Android 5.0.”(sixteenth point under Fixes)

So I downgraded to Unity 4.6.0 hoping it would help but the same problem occurred, this time Unity requires a minimum API level of 14.

So am I able to use Unity 4.6.0 for development on lower APIs such as 10? If so, how? Or would downgrading even further help (hopefully nothing under 4.3, as I would like to use Unity’s 2D mode)?

If it helps my phone is a Samsung Galaxy Ace (GT-S5830D) running Android 2.3.4.

2

OK I found how to change the target API by accessing the AndroidManifest.xml file and creating a “Plugins” and an “Android” folder in the Assets folder:

However this did not help me, Unity requires Android devices to have at least an ARMv7 (Cortex) CPU or Atom CPU, as said in the system requirements.

http://unity3d.com/unity/system-requirements

My device has a 800 MHz ARM 11 CPU, and I accidentally thought that ARM 11 was higher than ARMv7 (11 is a larger number than 7, that’s what my brain told me), but with research I learned that ARM 11 architecture is ARMv6, so my device would have been incompatible either way. Well that’s embarrassing…

So to answer my questions:

-No, the system requirements page is not out of date. (Well they can do something about the NEON devices)

-It likely is possible to develop for lower APIs such as 10 with Unity 4.6.0 (with the proper CPU of course)

-Reverting back to an older version of Unity will not help

I just hope no one makes the same dumb mistake I did.