Google will kill off very old versions of Android next month - Ars Technica

Starting September 27, devices running Android 2.3.7 and lower will no longer be able to log in to Google services, effectively killing a big portion of the on-rails Android experience.

Especially in older versions, many included apps and services were tied to your Google login, and if that stops working, a large chunk of your phone is bricked.

It's less than 0.2 percent of active devices, behind 14 other versions of Android.

Users of these old devices could still sideload a third-party app store and find replacements for all the Google apps, but if you're a technical user and can't get a new device, there's a good chance you could load a whole new operating system with an aftermarket Android ROM.

After September 27, the oldest version of Android you'll be able to sign in to is Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which is only for tablets.

This OS still isn't modular, but Google realized that login security updates would start to be an issue in the future, and Honeycomb added a "sign-in via browser" option to the initial setup.

This isn't the first time Google has killed off older versions of Android because of higher login security.