Because most devices can't be updated? Supporting version 4+ gives you a much larger audience than limiting to version 7+.

I think this was a very logical thing for them to do.

Supporting platforms that old comes with a massive amount of headaches. It is hard enough for big teams of applications with high MRR to do, and is near impossible for a FOSS application to do in perpetuity.

Because 5 year old isn't really that old. My Android 5 powered phone (which is my only phone) works perfectly fine, the only annoyance i have with it is that it has become sluggish - but that is the fault of software developers bloating their code (the software pretty much does the same stuff as it did when i got the phone years ago), not of the phone itself.

Note that i do not expect someone to do free work for me, i just do not consider a 5 year old device "old" enough to be weird for it to be supported - especially when it works just fine.

I know some people do this for iOS, so I would have expected it to almost be the norm on Android where many devices frequently fall behind on updates.

> I know some people do this for iOS

Apple devs has a smart trick how to declare you to buy new iPhone {n+1} just next day after it out: Apple devs just may decrease performance of your previous iPhone {n} fully remotely without any prompts to you and without your permission.[0]

And such remoted control over users costs only $500M single pay - not too much as for Apple at all.[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965119

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465829

Because its community driven FLOSS project.

And it would "OK" if there would no releases with new features... but bug fix releases which is worse.

Instead, team (owner & core members) just dropped & disabled everything, leaving Android 5.x/6.x device owners in frozen state.

Even more, team not proposed itself & ignored any proposition from others to at least support Termux for Android 5.x/6.x in LTS-way.