Only this past week, I received
some emails from Google with what I thought was an unusual reminder. The emails
told me that for security’s sake, Google will no longer allow me to sign on to
Android devices with Android MOS versions 2.3.7 and older, beginning late in
September. I was puzzled at first, considering my Android device is a recent Samsung
Galaxy smartphone. Then it hit me; I did have an old Android gadget lying
around: a Samsung Galaxy Tab hand-me-down from one of my relatives since the
earlier half of the 2010s. I am signed into it via my personal and business
Gmail addresses; but not anymore, soon.
I got confirmation from this
report by The Verge that Google this
past week announced that older Android devices will not allow users to sign
into Google accounts effective September 27. A community post for Android Help
in Google support pages explains thus: “If you sign into your device after
September 27, you may get username or password errors when you try to use
Google products and services like Gmail, YouTube, and Maps.” The only solution
to this is to have your old device upgrade to a newer version of Android like
3.0 at minimum.
Google warns that similar errors
will pop up on gadgets running Android 2.3.7 and below when logging in after
performing a device factory reset, changing passwords, removing then re-adding
a Google account on the gadget, or creating a new account. Note that Android
2.3.7 is the final release version of the Android Gingerbread MOS, the first
version of which came out December 6 of 2010, and the last being September 11
of the following year. Considering that there is an estimated three billion
active gadgets running Android around the world, there is no telling how many
of these are old enough to be affected, like my hand-me-down Samsung Galaxy
Tab.
Of course, even if September 27
comes and goes, leaving older devices that cannot upgrade Android MOS versions
unable to login to Google apps without errors they will not be locked out
completely. Users can still open their old gadget’s browsers, go to google.com
and log in from there. That means Google services might still be made to work,
but only on the device browser and not the app versions. The same deal actually
happened to my old Tab’s YouTube app; it stopped working (with errors) for me
in 2019, but I can still access videos on youtube.com via browser.
Still, if your old device can no
longer upgrade to newer Android, the obsolescence will mean that you will
increasingly have no choice but to junk them. My poor Galaxy Tab; it served me
well.
Image courtesy of Liliputing
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