Drop support for Android 5.0/5.1

[Isira-Seneviratne]

Checklist

• I made sure that there are no existing issues - open or closed - which I could contribute my information to.
• I have read the FAQ and my problem isn't listed.
• I'm aware that this is a request for NewPipe itself and that requests for adding a new service need to be made at NewPipeExtractor.
• I have taken the time to fill in all the required details. I understand that the feature request will be dismissed otherwise.
• This issue contains only one feature request.
• I have read and understood the contribution guidelines.

Feature description

It has been announced that the Jetpack libraries will drop support for Android versions below 6.0 starting in June 2025. I believe it'd be a good idea to do likewise at some point (perhaps in the refactor branch for now?).

Why do you want this feature?

Dropping support for Android versions below 6.0 would allow newer versions of the Jetpack libraries, including Compose, to be used. At the moment, the ones that have dropped support are still in alpha, so this change won't be needed very soon, and a release of the refactored app could be done before dropping support entirely.

Additional information

No response

[ShareASmile]

As part of that refactoring, the minimum Android version is due to be bumped, support for Lollipop (Android 5.1) devices will ditched, now NewPipe will target Marshmallow (6.0) as a minimum. Actually It was eminent. At last we had to bump minimum Sdk from 21 to 23 due to the reasons explained in #13438.

Please check forks like BravePipe (might be other as well) which at the time of writing continues to support older android versions even down up to 4.4.4 , So users on Android 5.0/5.1 may try to check availability of supporting builds at the link down below. Thank you for keeping along the long journey we had. Good Bye.

Link: https://github.com/bravepipeproject/BravePipe/releases