Apps still built for Android 5 are often clearly malware
If you have favorite old apps that haven’t been updated before 2015, updating to Android 14 (aka Upside Down Cake) will most likely stop them working. A decision was made to automatically block these apps to increase the security of the phone, or at least remove the attack vector. These older apps may have unpatched vulnerabilities. but it’s not the main reason it prevents loading.
It seems that some people are still building new apps for Android 5 and below because of these security issues. A significant number of them were found to be specifically exploiting these vulnerabilities to create new malware and do so in order to distribute it to Google Play users. Some might argue that Google could do a better job of vetting the apps it distributes instead of blocking them outright, but we don’t live in that kind of world.
If you want to keep your favorite old apps, you can still do so using the command shell. If you’re logged into the Android Open Source Project, there’s a link on Slashdot explaining the new flags.
