android sdk version managing

Question

I would like to know how android device handles sdk versions. If you set min version and target version. It does run on older then target and newer than min version, with compatibility mode? Or how exactly does this work.

Answer 1

If you set a minimum SDK version than you cannot install the app on devices with a lower API version. If you use a higher target SDK version than the device's API version that it will run except you execute code which requires a newer Android version. That would result a crash on the device since you would try to execute non existing code.

For some features there are backports which you can use. For other things you need to drop that features and check by code if the code can been executed or not.