A better solution might be to programmatically branch on the API version. The SDK docs do not have suggested pattern for handling API versioning, plugin authors must use the since-build or until-build attributes in the plugin manifest or otherwise maintain their own compatibility solution to support older IntelliJ Platform versions. In our case ApplicationInfo.getApiVersion() would probably do the trick, although it looks like the way IDEA-201007 was implemented this would still trigger an inspection error and require some kind of reflection to work properly on older API versions. cc: @serejke

I wonder if this would be better handled by a library similar to Android's appcompat support library.

@breandan, by default this inspection takes since-until values from the plugin.xml but you may specify your own values in the inspection's settings (popup on the message -> right arrow -> Edit inspection profile settings).

I don't recommend doing it, though, as you might miss the same problem in other places.

API branching based on ApplicationInfo.getApiVersion() is not always possible: if a new API didn't have an alternative in previous IDE builds, you'd have to either promote "since" values or not implement the feature for older platforms.

It seems that the easiest option is to just declare "since" value to be <build used to compile your plugin>, so if it is, say, 183.6156.11 (corresponding to 2018.3.6), then set the since to 183.6156.11. Since the latest released IDE is 2019.2 and the 193 is on the way, there might be no need to support older platforms.