The argument as laid out may in fact be misleading, but the issue of fragmentation is not just screen resolution and memory differences, either. It's at least

The argument as laid out may in fact be misleading, but the issue of fragmentation is not just screen resolution and memory differences, either. It's at least also: - display aspect ratio (far more important than resolution - worst case scenario with a "different resolution but same ratio" situation is that some things look more fuzzy than they ought to) - OLED vs LCD (colors can look substantially different) - hardware keyboard or not - hardware buttons: which ones are available and where they are placed - other hardware control availability / location / responsiveness - trackballs, non-screen touchpanels, etc - sensor availability - sensor quality: touch screen resolution and stability of tracking vary considerably - how quickly OS upgrades are made available per device / vendor / carrier and how quickly they spread across the user population - CPU speed - GPU speed and capabilities - different base applications installed with differing capabilities and UI appearance / feel Some of these of course exist in iOS world too, though not a few of the most important ones and on many of the less important, there is much less variation. One last note on iPad: few apps should have the same UI on phone-sized devices as they have on tablet-sized devices; if one is to include this as a count against iOS fragmentation, one has to also keep in mind that iOS device displays only come in 2 (radically different) physical sizes / aspect ratios whereas Android is intended to run on devices scaling from smaller screens than iPhone to larger than the iPad and everything in between. Which leads me to a question: iOS has a system-wide attribute that specifies whether the type of device is a "phone" or a "tablet"; is there a similar concept in Android?