Thanks to Project Mainline, AOSP has become modular enough that key features introduced with the latest Android release can be rolled out to devices running older versions of the OS. There are a lot of caveats that I’m glossing over here, but before Mainline came around, the only way for new Android features to be backported to older releases was through Google Play Services, which is closed source and not available through AOSP. Through a combination of Project Mainline and Google Play Services updates, the new Photo Picker Google introduced with Android 13 is available on devices running versions of Android as old as far back as Android 4.4.
That means that the new Photo Picker, by Google’s own metrics, is available on nearly 99.7% of all Android devices out there. Keep in mind that…