Your old Gingerbread Android phone is about to become even more useless

When was the last time you thought about your old Gingerbread phone? Google released Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to the public nearly ten years ago, ushering in the days of its Tron-inspired Holo UI, but some legendary Android devices – including the Moto Droid X, HTC Evo 4G, and the original Samsung Galaxy S – never made the jump. If you’re still holding a phone running Gingerbread, it’s about to get a lot harder to use with Google services.

As of September 27, any device running Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread or earlier will no longer be able to sign in to a Google account (via 9to5Google). The company specifically highlights Gmail, YouTube, and Maps as apps intended to produce username and password errors after that date. In an email sent to affected users, Google suggests updating your device to Android 3.0 or higher if possible (a strange request, given that Honeycomb was a tablet-exclusive version), but realistically the handwriting is on the wall. If you’re still using a Gingerbread phone as your daily pilot – or even as a secondary device – it might be time to give up the ghost.

As with most of Google’s operating system restrictions, this is primarily driven by safety and security. While Android phones have gained a lot of new features since 2011, they are also much more secure. Monthly security patches have become the norm for a reason, after all. These apps are also far from the first to be disabled on Gingerbread phones. WhatsApp stopped supporting the platform in January 2020, and it was removed from Google Play services entirely in 2017.

If for some reason you need to continue accessing Gmail or YouTube on an affected device, you’re out of luck. You can try to log into your account using your phone’s browser. Some web apps will still work with this method, although Google hasn’t highlighted what will and won’t be supported in its support forums.

Although distribution numbers for Android ceased to be shared a few years ago, Gingerbread had fallen to 0.3% market share by May 2019. It’s safe to say that number has fallen further since then, limiting the number of users it assigns to a small group. collectors at best. If you know someone who still watches YouTube videos on a Nexus One, make sure they know it’s finally time to pull the trigger on that upgrade.