How to interpret caniuse website information?

Question

I wanted to check what is the support of fetch API in browser so I opened caniuse.com to get this information.

Looking at Chrome browser I see this feature is available since version 42 (which released in april 2015), but looking at Chrome For Android and I see only version 84.

Does this mean that fetch API is available only in the latest version in Chrome For Android? That doesn't seem logical to me so what is the correct way to interpret this (and other) tables on caniuse.com website?

Answer 1

Caniuse hides browser versions with less than 0.5% percent of users, which you can check and tweak by clicking on settings. That spawns a sidebar. You can lower this number down as fast as 0.01%, but even then Chrome for Android only shows version 84. That is because so many people have automatic updates turned on, that at least for mobile browsers, it's much more likely that people are on the latest version. For desktop browsers, people have to deal with company guidelines, have to go through the trouble of clicking "update", etc.

So in conclusion, if a version is not shown, even at 0.01% in the settings, consider it non-existing.

Answer 2

What happened here is that there is no specific data for Chrome for Android, so caniuse defaults to saying that if it's supported in the latest desktop version, then it's also supported in the latest Android version. Nobody has taken the time to specifically test Chrome for Android.

In general, caniuse is a human-curated list and won't always be accurate. You'll be best served by tracking down more primary sources. For example, the Fetch API was enabled in Chromium in 2015-02, with no platform-specific exemptions.