I you look at that data then you can see that the oldest version with any significant usage is v8.1. But even that is quite low, and you might do quite well in not supporting anything older than v9.0.
What management? I decide this kind of thing myself in that project. The app is open-source and for a nonprofit. I don't see much reasoning to drop Android versions above 6.0 because there aren't that many API changes that would make a difference for my case. It's not like supporting 4.x or 2.x, the "you gotta carry the reimplementation of a substantial part of the UI framework with your app" kind of annoyance. The app in question doesn't even use appcompat. The apk is around 3 megabytes.
> Tell your management that usage of v6.0 is as good as gone, and you are wasting resources in doing any work to keep support for it
How do you say this without any knowledge whatsoever about the type of app they work on, or their target audience? v6.0 alone is almost 2% of users based on that chart. In fact if you include everything before v8.1, you seem to get something like 8% of users. What if their app, say, provides the poorest people access to public transportation? Would you really just drop 8% of people on the floor in any scenario?
Exactly this. Even if your demographic is the same as the chart, dropping 2% of users can be the difference between profit and destruction. Maybe it's margins that you'll save but keeping those users, possibly bad reviews, maybe market share over a competitor, there's plenty of reasons supporting older versions is not a definitive "waste."
Is it a pain to support old SDKs? Yep. But that doesn't make it inherently a waste of time to do so.
You have to weigh in the quality improvement of the app that you can provide by not limiting yourself to old apis, and also the resources that you can spend on improvement now that you aren't spending as much effort doing support for old versions.
I you look at that data then you can see that the oldest version with any significant usage is v8.1. But even that is quite low, and you might do quite well in not supporting anything older than v9.0.