Year Class

The current Android device list has around more than 10k different handsets. So it's hard to know how your application will perform on different devices. All having different amount of RAM, CPU speed, number of cores etc.

The year class is an attempt to categorise the device by placing it in a year where the device specifications would have placed it alongside the high-end devices. This allows you to easily modify the behavior of your application according the capabilities of the phone’s hardware. It is not neccessarily the year of manufacture or release of the device.

To retrieve this value use the yearClass property on the Device instance:

var year:int = Application.service.device.yearClass;

info

If the extension cannot determine the year of the device -1 will be returned. Generally this indicates that the device is newer than our algorithm allows for, so you can use your top performance level, however you may choose to use other methods to determine it yourself.

You can use this property to make decisions on the performance to attempt in your application, for example:

if (year >= 2018) 
{
    // Do advanced animation
}
else if (year > 2015) 
{
    // Do simple animation
}
else if (year == -1)
{
    // Could not determine year - assume very recent
}
else 
{
    // Phone too slow, don't do any animations
}

Implementation

On Android this uses the "Device Year Class" provided by Facebook: https://github.com/facebook/device-year-class

On iOS this returns the year of release as Apple devices generally are high-end when released.

Implementation​

Implementation