that statistic of java running on 3 billion devices is because of j2me phones
all the minecraft players still using java 8 for pvping on 1.8.9
According to https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/java-se-support-roadmap.html, Java 8 Extended Support will end in December 2030
The universe ends December 2030
somewhere off in the distance i hear a familiar jingle: ‘3 billion strong… and growing’
Shoot, I got paid to write a brand new Java 8 application… in 2020
But why?
In short: Money
Long story: Legacy
The really long story: They added a bunch of stuff in that version and it’s the last LTS before they removed a bunch of other stuff and a lot of companies are just too lazy to update their 10 year old crappy software.
The end.
Minecraft Java edition
It was true until Minecraft 1.17, now it requires at least Java 17
And Microsoft ended up providing their own compiled version of OpenJDK to get around the non-commercial use part of the licence to do it.
