What is google play-service distribution in android devices version wise?

Question

Just like Android give android version distribution worldwide? I want same way google play-service distribution. On the website, Google mentioned the only year of release.

Actually, we are using google map in our app so we wanted to confirm what should be our minimum play-services version so that it should work even if the user has not updated play-services.

My app minimum version is 15.

Answer 1

Afaik there is no official maintained distribution information like for the different Android OS versions.

But there are some hints about the distribution: In 2014, Sundar Pichai made an official statement about the play services in the Developers keynote:

"Google Play Services ships every six weeks and 93% of our users are on the latest version of Google Play services across all versions of Android. In fact by shipping every six weeks we can, in many ways, iterate faster than the typical OS release cycle."

You can watch that on youtube, at around minute 45 and 35 seconds.

Since the play services are updated by the Playstore itself without requiring further interaction or confirmation of the user, I think you can assume that most users are quite up-to-date. So if you set the minimum required version to a version that was released some months ago you should include most of the users.