Unity 4.6 and Android API level 8

I believe Android API level 8 was dropped starting with Unity 4.5, which made it unlikely to be able to continue publishing Unity developed apps on the Nook app store. Any time I submit an app now is rejected because they still use Android API level 8. Now that I'm using Unity 4.6, I can't even revert to an earlier version of Unity and compile for Android API 8. Is this situation a problem for anyone else? Just curious.

Solution

This isn't something that one would expect to be "fixed" in future. API 9 (Gingerbread) added a number of improvements to the NDK, including adding support for x86.

Intel has been working very closely with Unity, and their partnership has resulted in, amongst other things "...Native Android support for Intel architecture in Unity* 4.x and Unity* 5"."

API 8 didn't support the NDK on x86. Additionally:

API 8 (Froyo) now represents less than 1% of all Android devices
API 9 added additional features relevant to Unity, such as higher screen resolutions.
Google recommends API 14+ (which represents over 84% of all Android devices)

While I suspect that NDK enhancements were the driving cause of dropping API 8 support, you can see there is very little reason for Unity to keep investing in API 8 support.

Note: Most hardware supported by 2.2+ was also supported by 2.3+, which is why API 8 is on so few devices now. Of those devices that didn't get 2.3, most are too dated to run the majority of Unity applications. I suspect the Nook Color would fall into that category with a nearly decade old GPU, the PowerVR SGX520.