Since we launched the Android SDK for Augmented Reality, we’ve received lots of feedback.

The challenge of supporting many devices and facing the fragmentation of Android has taken our mobile development team into many hours of sleepless coding. Finally, we’re proud to release the new version of the SDK, with improved stability, and ready for new features that will come up very soon.

What’s new in our CraftAR Android SDK v2.2?

With this new version comes the following changes:

• Several stability fixes
• Improved support for video content
• Improved camera capture performance
• Updated internal OpenSSL lib
• Minimum API level support changed to HONEYCOMB+ (API level 11+)

Dropping support for Android v2.3 and earlier versions

We have decided to drop support for Android 2.3 on the Augmented Reality SDK for the following reasons:

• Android 2.3 is limited and we can’t support the full set of features for the Augmented Reality content (for instance loading content in parallel).
• In Android 2.3, we can’t benefit from newer API features of the latest Android versions necessary to provide optimal access to the camera for deep image processing.
• The size of the SDK is large and, commonly, devices running Android 2.3 have very little storage available.

In general, what we see in the market is that most devices running Android 2.3 are not very powerful and the Augmented Reality experience turns out to be really poor.

What can I do now with my app for Android 2.3?

The advantage of CraftAR is that interaction with the real world is still possible, namely by using Image Recognition only. Your objects can still be scanned, you should simply avoid loading the content and rendering in an AR view. Instead, consider opening a landing URL or video content (if you had that) in full screen.