in your position, I'd drop old android. just make it android 10+ or something. idk if people still daily drive pre 2019 phones, and if they do? skill issue, used 2020 F L A G S H I P S are spare change nowadays. can catch myself a nearly mint condition used Galaxy S20 FE 5G in installments of like $10 USD per month.
i get the point, but around 30 percent of players are still on older android versions according to itch.io insights, and i use one myself. dropping support would lock out a lot of active users. from a dev side it also only costs me about three hours per release to port to older android, which i do not mind at all
oh? well, then it isn't that bad, you described above like it was making the entire game three times, one for each version.
that doesn't look too bad tho. wonder what's the minimum this game will run on, considering "old" android I'd say it's way older than "X Gen N" era of Snapdragon and also obviously before Dimensity era of MTK.