PSA: Google Chrome Support Ending Soon for These Android Phones

Google Chrome is the most widely used mobile browser, and you probably don’t need any statistics to back that up. But if you do, Statcounter’s latest most popular mobile browsers globally report confirms it. However, Google Chrome is now dropping support for a number of Android devices.

Google Chrome is ending support for Android 8 and 9, starting August

You generally don’t need to worry about Google ending Chrome support for your Android phone, unless you haven’t updated it in a very long time. For what it’s worth, the current version of Chrome is the last one to support Android 8.0 and 9.0. A new Google Chrome update, scheduled for August 5, will require Android 10 (One UI 2) or newer to continue receiving updates.

Credits: SammyGuru/Abhinav Anand

This change, of course, won’t affect most users since Android 8 and 9 came in 2017 and 2018, respectively. To put that into perspective, it’s been about seven to eight years since their release. Even if you bought a phone during that time, it likely received updates to Android 10 or newer, which means you should be safe.

However, this does leave behind phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+, and Galaxy Note 8, which did not receive Android 10 updates. But these devices are now around eight years old, and the chances of someone still using one as their primary phone are slim. If you do, and unless you want to keep it as a keepsake, there’s little reason to hang on to it.

You could trade it in for whatever value you can get, or find some creative ways to repurpose your old Android device. For example, you could use it to remotely monitor CCTV footage or keep it as a backup phone for calls and basic tasks. But using one of these phones as your primary device nowadays is rare, and definitely not recommended.