VietMX Staff asked 4 years ago
The Support Library is generally used when you want to easily support a wider range of OS versions with less version specific source – with it you can use features introduced in higher version of the OS on older platforms without having to worry and check whether this platform has that feature and do something in case it doesn’t.
You should use one of the support libraries when you need specific framework features that are newer than the minSdkVersion of your app or that are not available in the standard framework.
The compatibility libraries largely use shims to back port features. These compatibility shims are thin wrappers around components that pass calls through to the underlying framework implementation if used on a release that supports the API. On older releases, the shims instead call the support implementation, perhaps with slightly different or reduced functionality.
