Add api 21 into CI

[Jaehwa-Noh]

What I have done and why

Cover api 21 with Continuous Integration to detect early crash from minSdk api version.

Using decodeFromString instead decodeFromStream api 21 below version, reference by Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization#2457 (comment)

Fix #1490

[keyboardsurfer]

Thanks for your PR. Currently there are conflicts that need to be resolved before we can move on to possibly accepting your contribution. Please resolve the conflicts.

[dturner]

The older emulators are notoriously flaky and should not be added to the Build workflow. Please remove the API 21 emulator. Please also update the PR description to more accurately describe what this fixes.

[Jaehwa-Noh]

@dturner Could you check this PR #1485 (comment)

This PR will crashes at startup on an API 21 device.

The developers are hard to notice all dependencies and can't ensure that works lowest api 21, be supported in this project, well.
We can early catch the crash on API 21 with Instrumented tests.

[SimonMarquis]

To be honest, I don't think it is worth to have an entire CI pipeline just to catch one specific issue on this specific library that was not properly documented in the first place.
A comment should suffice, or a lint detector if we really want to not reuse this. But API 21 is like 0.1% of active users on the play store...

[Jaehwa-Noh]

@SimonMarquis From your comment, why don't we change lowest api 21 to 22 or so?

[Jaehwa-Noh]

When nobody cares lowest api 21, It would be better to shift up the lowest api.

[SimonMarquis]

It depends I guess. Sometimes we have to bump the lowest compatible version when using dependencies that are themselves forcing a higher limit. Using the same value as the default Android template from Android Studio might be a good fit (not sure what it is nowadays).
But anyways, this will be the maintainer's choice.

[Jaehwa-Noh]

@dturner I am just as missing your point, the purpose of this PR is API 21 on CI makes work.
and the reason of needing API21 CI is this comment.
#1496 (comment)

If you decide API 21 doesn't need any more, closing this PR.
Else, let me know keep going.

[dturner]

@Jaehwa-Noh To be clear, we should definitely fix the code that is causing the app to crash on API 21. Thanks for addressing this.

However, my point (and @SimonMarquis as well) is that because API 21 has such a small market share it doesn't make sense to add it to CI. Granted, the benefit would be that we could spot problems running the app on API 21 early. But the cost is we have to spin up an API 21 emulator for every single commit, and as I mentioned before, the old emulators are flaky which means we'd almost certainly get a lot of false negatives, something which has significantly hindered our development velocity recently.

In summary, please carry on fixing the API 21 problem on this PR but remove the update to the Build workflow.

Side note: The Android Studio default API level for new projects is 24, giving 97.4% coverage as of today, Thu 19th Dec 2024. If we run into any more issues with APIs <24 then we should update to minSDK=24.

[Jaehwa-Noh]

This code works on the CI with API 21, 22, 23.
https://github.com/Jaehwa-Noh/nowinandroid/actions/runs/12443126186/job/34741972448

[Jaehwa-Noh]

@dturner @keyboardsurfer Ready to get review.