You may have heard that with Android 14 you can no longer install old apps made for Lollipop. Android 15 is coming soon and will similarly block Marshmallow apps. Let’s hold back the tears as we wave goodbye to one of the best versions of Android in history and some of the best apps and games to go in the big robot bakery in the sky.
Android 6.0 Marshmallow was introduced almost ten years ago, on May 28, 2015 at Google I/O that year. The beta was released on the same day, and the stable version arrived in September first on Nexus phones and tablets. In November, it first appeared on the OS version distribution chart – back then, Android 4.4 KitKat was still king and Lollipop was just breaking through the 20% share mark.
Version 6.0 brought features that we now take for granted. For example, it introduced native USB-C support, which is now an industry standard (after some backlash finally subsided).
Another big addition was support for a fingerprint reader. This replaced simple pattern locks with a more secure system, which was concerned with not only unlocking your phone, but also keeping your money safe within Android Pay (this morphed into Google Pay and then Wallet).
Android 6.0 brought native support for fingerprint readers
The security theme continues with the new permission model. It used to be all or nothing – apps required access to certain functions of your phone and your only real choice was whether to install the app or not. With Marshmallow, for the first time an app would ask you to do something – access your files? Place? Microphone? You could just tap “no” and the app had to deal with it.
Marshmallow introduced the app permissions system
Android 6.0 also introduced new mechanisms to extend battery life. Doze was a new sleep mode that changed how much apps could do depending on whether you were physically holding the phone or not. If your phone is in your hand, apps need to be responsive. If the phone sits idle on your nightstand, apps are muted and only high-priority events can get through.
Doze limited background activity and network access for apps. This would negatively affect things like messenger, but they could ask for permission to stay active even when the rest of the phone goes to sleep.
There was an even deeper state of sleep, App Standby. Android doesn’t really make a clear distinction between which apps run and which don’t, at least not the way Windows, Linux, and macOS do. This means that the app can reduce battery life even if you are not actively using it. With version 6.0, infrequently used applications could be put on standby, further limiting their capabilities. Interacting with the app automatically returns it to the active state, so if everything is working properly, you wouldn’t even notice that the app is in a standby state.
Flex Storage was a big change that was later reversed. It gave you the option to format the microSD card as part of the internal storage. This means you can no longer modify it at work, but this has removed some barriers around external storage. You can choose to move the data to the microSD, freeing up internal storage. Only parts of a particular app would be moved, but those were usually the biggest parts – ie the game code stays on the fast internal storage, the game assets (graphics, sound, etc.) can go on the large external storage.
These days we have things like the A2 rating for cards, which guarantee a minimum transfer and IOPS speed to be usable as application storage. But how many phones still have a microSD slot? And the Android versions that came after Marshmallow destroyed Flex Storage anyway.
Moving on, Android 6.0 introduced “contextual assistants”. Remember Google Now on Tap? That’s what a contextual assistant is (“AI” wasn’t that popular in 2015). The context can be anything – a photo, a song, an email, etc. and you would get relevant information and quick access to actions like search, navigation, sharing, social media and so on.
Google Now on Tap brought context-sensitive information and actions
While Nexus devices were the first to receive Android 6.0 Marshmallow, other manufacturers quickly began announcing updates for select models from their lineup. Looking back at OS version distributions, Marshmallow crossed the 1% mark in early 2016 and became the top version in June 2017. It would never go much past the 30% mark as Nougat came out and things started moving towards version 7 .
By the way, there is a way to sneak in an older app, but you’ll have to sideload it using ADB. We don’t think many will go through the trouble. This means that apps that were last updated in the Marshmallow era will no longer be available to almost all Android users.
Do you have an old app that you still use? Do you have any old games that you still love?