To ensure the fragmentation is smooth, this is what I would do. The 2.x branch can be used for the low-end android phones while the 3.x and above branch works o

To ensure the fragmentation is smooth, this is what I would do. The 2.x branch can be used for the low-end android phones while the 3.x and above branch works on high-end phones. But for that to happen, touchscreen and accelerometer would have to become cheaper or should have cheaper variants like the one in HTC Tatoo. And the high-quality stuff like SuperAMOLED screen and whatever comes later would have too be saved for the high-end phones. It now solely depends on the unity of manufacturers. They'll have to work together to set some standards to differentiate between low-end (2.x) and high-end devices(3.x and above). Google does define in the minimum hardware compatibility spec that all android devices have a touchscreen and an accelerometer. But it requires co-operation among the manufacturers so that no moronic manufacturer would release a low-end android phone with 3.x or higher just to boast of a better firmware than it's other low-end competitors. Then they have slowly phase out 2.x and start making 3.x low-end phones while the hardware tech would have improved by then (i assume so), so all the high-end phones would have higher minimum requirements to run android 4.x or 5.x or whatever is the greatest during that time. In the meantime the android market would have to allow uploading different version of applications. Else apps that want to support low end phones but want to make use of the features of the high end phones would have considerably high binary file size and (maybe) processing overhead due to the code included to check feature support in the phone/os. P.S: I can guess what HTC is going to do when it comes to updating Desire and Evo to Froyo. I don't think they will. They might just fast-forward to 3.x like what they did to Hero (skipped 1.6 coz 2.x was released by the time they released firmware so fast-forwarded to 2.1)