So, you’ve been using your Galaxy S for almost a decade and haven’t bother flashing a third-party ROM to your aging handset, choosing instead to carry on running the last official firmware based on Gingerbread 2.3.6. It’s bad news, I’m afraid because Google has announced that it will stop users from signing in on devices running Gingerbread 2.3.7 and older from September 27th, 2021.
What does it mean?
Well, the announcement means that you’ll no longer be able to sign in to Google’s apps and services such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, or Calendar on your device, with an error message popping up if you attempt to do so. The next cutoff is Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) although that was a version of Android targeted at the tablet segment which means that smartphones running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or above will still be able to sign in to Google.
If there isn’t an official update available for your handset and flashing a custom ROM isn’t something you feel comfortable doing, Google says that users will be able to sign in using a web browser on the device instead of the native app, so that’s something at least. Having said that, it really is long past time to move on to a more modern handset if at all possible so that you can benefit from the increased security offered by later versions of the Android OS.
