15 ms·

How Fragmented Is Android?

225 points by tgp22 7y ago

monocasa 7y ago
These articles rarely go over what, if any, practical concerns there are. The Wintel market is even more fragmented, but that's not really an issue in practice because the abstractions are more or less in the right place.
- samdung 7y ago
  The articles states the vast majority of android phones do not receive any updates but Google is able to collect valuable data from these devices. I beleieve this is a practical concern.
  - atomicUpdate 7y ago
    Why is this a concern? They never paid for Android to begin with and still get to use Google services like Maps, Play, GMail, etc.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  You can install stock Win 10 on any machine you buy, or most Linux distros with the same boot image thanks to UEFI and the PC spec. Android ARMs are NOT an architecture. They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels. Oreo and the /vendor partition may help with this some. Still, it's a far cry from the Linux/PCs days of the 90s. I've written about this before: https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/
  - derefr 7y ago
    > They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels. Sounds like arcade cabinets. Maybe we need something that does for Android ARM devices what MAME does for those: specifies each device as an abstract wiring diagram of pins to bits of patched kernel acting as ROMs. And then make that whole thing into a kernel virtualization-provider module, which uses the stock kernel for anything not masked over by ROMs.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      This is what devicetree is supposed to be. However, as with the arctic machine, the incentives are misaligned - they actively don't want to be commoditized.
      - djsumdog 7y ago
        Windows phones did at least have UEFI + arm. You can unlock the bootloaders of many of them now. But there's still no driver support for mobile data and several other critical hardware components.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    But none of that matters for app developers. (Also, Wintel machines are very much random pins soldered to random crap, they just do a better job papering over it with ACPI AML bytecode)
- MiddleEndian 7y ago
  Wintel is something that could be taken down a notch, but it seems everything outside of the x86 family is even worse. If I buy a Dell laptop or a Lenovo laptop, it will come with a bunch of useless junk installed that nobody in their right mind would ever want, like Lenovo's useless gigantic Wi-Fi icon in Windows (last observed by me in a T520). But not only can I uninstall all of that junk software, I am still running real Windows. And that means I can update it normally. Compare that to an Android device. You get a phone from a company like Samsung and you cannot uninstall the Facebook app no matter what you do. You get a phone from HTC and maybe they decide to push an update from 7.something to 8.0 and 8.0 introduces a new issue. That is fixed in 8.1 but you can never actually upgrade to 8.1 because it's not the real version of Android it's the HTC version of Android and they have ordained that your device shall never go past 8.0 and they pushed some firmware "security" update that prevents you from installing any other OS on your device. Additionally, some software seems to be dictated by your mobile carrier, which would be like allowing Comcast to control what you run on your PC. So whatever fragmentation there is on Wintel (or LinAmd), it is not nearly as hostile to the user as the Android ecosystem.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    That's a good point. Imagine Microsoft allowed third-party computer manufacturers to ship custom-built versions of Windows with modifications and third-party drivers that didn't have to be released in any publicly usable format. We'd have a real mess! To be clear, I don't think this is a failing of open source. The problem is that Google allowed phone manufacturers to release practically anything they wanted based on the Android code base under the name "Android" and to ship with the common market (Google Play). Frankly I don't think they should have allowed any modifications, making Android closer to how Firefox is distributed. (Anyone can edit the source code of Firefox, and even release a fully built binary based on that edited code, but you can't call it Firefox.) Maybe fewer manufacturers would have bought in at the outset, or maybe some would have tried to fork Android, but it's easy to forget what a desperate situation they were in. Outside of Apple and maybe Blackberry, the mobile OS market was in shambles because nobody was ready with high quality smartphone software. Android was a huge win and probably saved multiple companies from bankruptcy, and I think they would have eventually bought in to a more strictly defined OS out of necessity.
on_and_off 7y ago
I work on an Android app aimed at the North American market. Android O, P and Q are 88% of our Android devices. By far and large, fragmentation is something I _never_ have to think about. Jetpack libraries are here to handle it for us, as an abstraction layer between the OS and third party apps. I would have mentioned that e.g. camera apps are an exception : here hardware fragmentation can be a pain. I was half surprised to see that Google is also working on that one with the camera x library. There have been cases where the fragmentation bites us; and there might be in the future (although in all fainess my iOS colleagues sometimes have to create specific fixes as well) but the last time I had to scratch my head because of a device specific bug was years ago. And at the time, I was already finding these articles deeply ridiculous.
- orangecat 7y ago
  camera apps are an exception : here hardware fragmentation can be a pain Yes. The backwards sensors in the Nexus 5x and 6 were particularly amusing/irritating: https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9696774/google-nexus-5x-upside-down-camera https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9696774/google-nexus-5x-u....
- mattlondon 7y ago
  +1 I have a few hobby apps on the app store that gave had a few thousand downloads. Not a huge sample but generally speaking it's N+ that has the vast majority of users. My apps are fairly standard or are games - most API levels since M seem to basically cover everything I need 99% of the time. I have no interest AT ALL in the manufacturer of the device. Fragmentation simply doesn't feel like an issue, at least to me.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    Fragmentation becomes an issue when you're either building services that run in the background or interact with hardware (BT, WiFi, WiFi-direct, Camera, GNSS, Gyro/Accel). I feel fragmentation hard with my app.
    - on_and_off 7y ago
eugeniub 7y ago
The fault of fragmentation lies at many levels, including distributors. The bookstore at my alma mater in the Midwest is normally great at promoting modern tech products, but they recently started pushing two models of a phone with KitKat at $100+ pricepoints. That's Android 4.4, which was deprecated in 2015. Who are these phones for? They're not even suitable for computer science students, because trying to learn Android development with a KitKat device is incredibly suboptimal.
- on_and_off 7y ago
  A google search on 100$ android phones returned a "best cheap android phones" list. The first entry is the Nokia 2 (never tried one but I heard good things). For 85$ it ships with Oreo. That's kind of amazing : for a relatively modest sum, you get a lot of technology. It makes me wonder why anybody would recommend a costlier device shipping with 4.4
jherdman 7y ago
> My POV is ... Apple leads the Mobile OS market share ... by a huge margin. I'm having a really hard time understanding this statement. Does the author mean with respect to how updates are handled? It clearly cannot mean in terms of sheer number of installs, Android is clearly _leagues_ ahead of iOS in that regard.
- josteink 7y ago
  He’s basically claiming that latest iOS has higher market share than latest Android version (which may be true), and from that concludes that the rest of the android versions in the market somehow don’t count, so iOS is biggest. Android has its issues, but “math” like this isn’t the answer. This is drivel, really. Also: See Wintel for fragmentation. Everywhere in nature and tech diversity is good. But somehow not for mobile phone OSes.
  - arendtio 7y ago
    > diversity is good It depends on what the cause is. If I have no option to update to a recent version and causing diversity that way, it is bad. If I can choose to install a custom version, it is good. So in Android's case, the diversity is just a symptom of the underlying fragmentation of responsibility for updates. However, phone manufacturers might see this a bit differently.
- IloveHN84 7y ago
  Wait, what? We are comparing really the 90% of Android Global Market Share vs 9% of iOS?
- Gudin 7y ago
  The conclusion is unexpected and stupid. Android doesn't brag it has 75% share. Actual data is that 85% of smartphones run Android and that's market share. Fact that they are not updated to the latest version doesn't change the market share.
  - matwood 7y ago
    "Addressable" market share maybe? A developer can target iOS current version and current version-1, and cover the large majority of iOS devices. How far back does an Android developer have to target? Maybe it doesn't matter since the Android marketshare is so much larger that targeting current - 1 stills gets more devices than iOS.
pjmlp 7y ago
Khronos likes to talk about Vulkan support on Android. The reality is that thanks for it being an optional API, introduced in version 7, only flagships have proper support. And even then, each OEM provides a different version, with their own set of instructions. Hardly any better than GL ES. Now they are doing it compulsory on Android 9, upgradable via the store, with GL support being supported via ANGLE. Guess what, first you need to get a device with Android 9 on it. This just an example among many others across other API surface areas. So much for Java on mobiles being too much of fragmented system that Google was going to sort out with their solution, hence the need to undercut Sun.
- zanny 7y ago
  I don't get the negative sentiment here. When Vulkan was brand new Google didn't want to force it in 7.0 or they might have had even more devices still stuck on 6.0 today. The fact they made it mandatory and independent of vendor in 9 is laudable. Doing so absolutely costs them adoption of the latest releases but they did it anyway. When you say "first you need a device with Android 9" that is on the vendors to provide. And the scarcity of 9 can in part be contributed to compulsory Vulkan support. Most of Googles first party phones now run it, even though their general attitude of abandoning 4+ year old products is still egregious.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    If Google was anything like Microsoft, they would produce stuff like Android 2019 OEM requirements, and provide the OS directly from them. Like for example, the "PC 98 System Design Guide": https://www.amazon.com/PC-98-System-Design-Guide/dp/1572317167 https://www.amazon.com/PC-98-System-Design-Guide/dp/15723171... Fact is, just get a new phone is not an answer that consumers likes to hear. Not every country is like US with everyone on contracts getting free replacements every two years. Many of us enjoy the freedom of pre-paid replacable SIM cards, and use our phones until they either die or get stolen. In any case, I only used Vulkan as the most recent example, I can give plenty of other ones, and I develop native Android as hobby. Other Android developers with more in depth knowledge have plenty of war stories.
- 7y ago
DiabloD3 7y ago
The article concludes, as far as I can tell, it isn't fragmented, it just has a bunch of recent enough versions on similar enough devices to run most apps. Apps don't care what version of Android you run, they care what API support you have, and apps can detect API support at runtime and adapt. OTOH, the article fails to mention that Apple refuses to let you support devices after EOL, and even some of the oldest Android devices in existence can run even the newest Android, as long as you're willing to upgrade the ROM yourself. Phone hardware typically is literally falling apart after 3-5 years, any truly old phones are ones that users have chose to keep on life support but not upgrade their ROMs (or made the mistake of buying a phone from a consumer-hostile brand, which is, ultimately, the only valid argument for Android fragmentation). The only company that is truly consumer hostile is Samsung. And, frankly, I don't know why anyone would buy Samsung or Apple or even Google's own Pixel series... OnePlus charged me $550 for a phone (the 6T) that has the same size screen (and its an AMOLED too), literally same parts, but with more RAM and storage, and a bigger battery, that is otherwise identical to a Pixel 3XL or a Samsung S9+ or whatever top tier extra large phone that costs $800-1300; and that new 7 Pro? Still an amazing deal, and OnePlus supports Android on their phones ridiculously long times.
- pekalicious 7y ago
  What makes Samsung phones consumer hostile? Their ridiculous prices? Because I wouldn't call that hostile, rather simply overpriced. And I would agree that they are. However, I still have every galaxy note I have ever owned, working, and in great condition (Note 2, 5, and now 8). My dad is actually using the 5. All of them got upgraded at least once to a newer Android OS and they are still solid devices. Granted, other than Note, I've only owned a Startosphere for the hw keyboard, so I can't compare it to others, but even after I realized that the Note 8 was crazy expensive and made me double think what my next phone will be, I worry if the longevity can be matched.
  - DiabloD3 7y ago
    Samsung phones ship with ROMs that try to remove as much of the native Android experience as possible, and tend to eat battery life for no good reason. Swapping ROMs to AOSP-like experiences vastly improves battery life and performance on many Samsung phones. Several Galaxy and Note devices also cannot ROM swap at all due to locked bootloaders, which makes that the most consumer hostile thing of all. I'm not sure which models this effects, but it is enough to put Samsung on my forever shitlist.
rarestblog 7y ago
Well, if you remove all iOS versions with <3.42% penetration, then you should remove the same from the Android table and use 2 decimals for Android like for iOS. https://i.imgur.com/0Ar0ta5.png https://i.imgur.com/0Ar0ta5.png My point being: there ARE other iOS versions in use. I have a backup working iPhone 4 turned on right now. It won't upgrade beyond iOS 5 (I think it's iOS 5). But somehow the author ignores all those 0.1% iOS versions, yet shows them for Android (with 4 decimals no less).
- stesch 7y ago
  By the way: iPhone 4 supports iOS 7.1.2, released 4 years after the iPhone 4.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    I'm not sure why the GP said his iPhone 4 won't upgrade past iOS 5, but it's worth noting: while an iPhone 4 can be upgraded to iOS 7, actually doing so is a bad idea unless you want your phone to run slow as molasses. You'll be much better off on iOS 6 or 5. (I suppose there may be a security argument for upgrading as far as possible, but it's not like iOS 7 is up-to-date either. If you're concerned about security, you shouldn't be using an iPhone 4.)
    - rarestblog 7y ago
      Correct. It won't upgrade past 7.1.2 not 5. My mistake.
    - alkonaut 7y ago
      > You'll be much better off on iOS 6 or 5. Sure. But if you are making an app for say a government service that has as a requirement to reach 98% of mobile users, and you reach the goal if you count compatible devices (not people who choise not to upgrade) then it helps.
  - rarestblog 7y ago
    Correct, sorry, didn't bother to look at the time. It is 7.1.2. The point still stands, it's old and I'm probably in 0.1% that the article left out in iOS markets.
rocky1138 7y ago
> The vast majority of iPhone users update to the latest version quite fast and flawlessly. Has this person ever been around iPhone owners when a new update comes out? I seem to remember a ton of lamentation at every step of slower speed, worse battery, laggy UI, moved features, removed features, and the like. Yeah, there's a lot of different Android versions out there. Who cares? Other than security updates, it's pretty much a non-issue. Developers target the version they want to support and publish their app online.
- mberning 7y ago
  Maybe on one particular major version update. The vast majority of updates are completely painless, as evidenced by such a large percentage of people having no reservation about updating to the latest version.
com2kid 7y ago
Something that doesn't get talked about as much is the differences between how manufacturers customize their OS. It has been talked about a fair bit on HN (https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/), but it really is a huge problem. I can be listening to music on my phone and One+ will just kill Pandora, or Spotify. I have to manually "lock" music apps and workout apps in One+'s task switching UI to keep them from being randomly killed while in use. Hilariously enough I have one game on my phone that will always run in the background and never be killed, sucking down a lot power. Somehow even when not in the foreground it consumes massive CPU. I don't think it is even malicious, just oddly programmed. I wish my music apps could pull off the same trick though!
- Knufen 7y ago
  I have a One+ and I can't really recommend Greenify (App) enough. Forces all apps to shutdown, even those running in the background.
  - com2kid 7y ago
    I have plenty of memory, I don't want apps force closed. If I switch from a game to a browser to look something up, being able to switch back to the (paused) game 5 minutes later is a feature, not a bug. Apps that obey backgrounding and stop doing work (e.g. burning CPU/Power) are fine.
- snek 7y ago
  I've had a 1+1, 1+3, and 1+5, and I never had this issue on any of them.
- rubyn00bie 7y ago
  I don't think a lot of people understand how apps run in the background on Android. I know having worked on one recently, coming from iOS, I had a lot of assumptions about what it would or wouldn't be doing... and they were all wrong (of course). Turns out Android, at least however this app is setup, maybe by default, leaves the app fully running. Like zero effort to suspend it automatically. A part of the UI crashed and a hunt to find the bug made me realize this... I fixed the bug, but still haven't really looked into how to really suspend it.
jmiskovic 7y ago
I'm not a professional app developer. A year ago I invested few months to develop an app I wanted to have. Today it has few thousand users. Fragmentation doesn't bother me. Yes, on some devices the app crashes, on others the sound lag is unbearable. I don't really care, as long as it works fine on most devices. Two things infuriate me, though. Enough to never again spend another minute developing for android. Every time I enter android studio, it wants to update. The studio wants to update. Suddenly it's incompatible with build system (yes, the build system has dependencies on IDE version!). Then gradle wants to update. Then SDK. Then IDE again. It's never-ending cycle of updates. Each update has 20% chance to cause build errors on this project (Love2D for Android). Each error has a cryptic message, and it's resolved by something completely unrelated to error message. Usually it's solved by bumping up the minimal SDK version and thus cutting off some percentage of potential users. I dread each and every attempt to re-build my app. The second thing is recent requirement to provide 64-bit version of each app. My app depends on framework written in C++ with additional libraries in C. I can't and won't spend time to get the build for 64-bit version working. Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide". So I won't be able to update existing app to existing users ever again, for non-technical reasons. Fragmentation I can deal with. All web developers deal with it daily. But Google's treatment of development is horrible and I don't want any part of it. Because of this I've transitioned to web as platform. At least I can be safe that anything I build will be runnable in 10 or 20 years.
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  >Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide". So I won't be able to update existing app to existing users ever again, for non-technical reasons. Isn't the reason entirely technical? 64-bit apps can use 64-bit only instruction sets, which are newer and usually faster, resulting in a performance improvement. BTW, apple did the same thing years ago on iOS and is planning to kill 32-bit apps on MacOS soon.
  - izacus 7y ago
    I think Google wants to allow OEMs to build devices that only support arm64-v8a arch - this will make the OS image significantly smaller because now they need to ship several components in duplicate - 32 and 64-bit versions. This is beneficial to total size of OS on the flash. Apple did this years ago.
stesch 7y ago
I'm wondering if letting your app support very old OS versions is a good thing. You get more customers but aren't the ones with the old OS more likely be the ones causing the most problems (= work) because they aren't very tech savvy?
- klingonopera 7y ago
  It provides economic opportunities for third party services. Supporting your local IT/Phone-store around the corner in assisting me is preferable to me than to buy a new phone.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
somedudetbh 7y ago
From the article: "So the Android ecosystem is split between at least 1,728 combinations of OS - Brand - Device Model" It's actually _much worse_ than this. Here's a review of the "Samsung Galaxy S10+": https://www.anandtech.com/show/14072/the-samsung-galaxy-s10plus-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/14072/the-samsung-galaxy-s10p... This "device model" is actually two devices with completely different SoCs. There is no meaningful sense in which these two phones are one device. Sometimes the manufacturers document this, sometimes they just start selling a phone that identifies itself by the same name as an existing phone but with a GPU that has completely different performance characteristics.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  It's probably not worse than that because he makes the totally incorrect assumption that Android version and device are independent, which is obviously not the case. Most people update their phones to the latest available version for their phone, so it would be 144 OS-device-manufacturer combos (more or less).
dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
I know this post is about Android versions but I recently launched a new service and have been watching user agents and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see no matter the Android version, it’s almost always running Chrome 73/Firefox 66. I have a user running Android 5.5.1, another on some version of 4! Yet they’re on modern browsers. This isn’t true for anyone on an old iOS. Those users are stuck with old browsers, which is quite sad for the user and developer.
- robocat 7y ago
  FYI: Android 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 will soon get no more updates to Chrome[1]. Android 4.0 is stuck on an old version of Chrome. For WebView, Android 4.4 is stuck on Chrome 30/33 and anything older still uses AOSP. Samsung users often use the Samsung browser, which is often a very obsolete version that came with the phone. 1. https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-android-dropping-support-android-4-1-4-3-jelly-bean/ https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-android-droppin...
  - ggg2 7y ago
    hopefully firefox will continue to run fine on those (and get faster over time) chrome on android is dead to me. so many antifeatures it's maddening.
  - oblio 7y ago
    Android 4.1-3 are from 2012, early 2013. So 6-7 years old. Those old devices are barely functional to view modern webpages, anyway.
    - dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
      That’s the assumption I made but is that actually true you think? This is true of iOS devices after OS upgrades, I’ve experienced this myself: Apple ruins old devices with software updates. But I somehow doubt that a phone from 2012 must be ruined with bad software. Any idea?
ajnin 7y ago
I've been tracking the data from Google's Android dashboards over time : https://www.bidouille.org/misc/androidcharts https://www.bidouille.org/misc/androidcharts From these observations, it seems that Android's fragmentation is getting worse, and that newer versions of Android have more and more trouble establishing themselves as the dominant version. In fact, JellyBean was the last version to reach more than 50%.
- izacus 7y ago
  It is hard to understate how MISLEADING these dashboards are. They are so, so, so wrong. I've professionally worked on several apps/libraries which reached millions of Android users and not one of them (not one!) had a distribution that's even close to what those dashboards show. Any kind of app that's not exclusively targeting emerging markets on 512MB phones will have significantly higher percentage of newer Androids. If you're targeting US, EU, China, Japan, Korea and S. America you'll probably have Androids before 6.x in marginal <10% total figures. Any kind of app that's being released together with its iOS version will probably have double to triple percentage of new Android versions and pretty much non-existant usage stats on Androids before 5.0. Those dashboards reflect pretty much no app published on Play store - not even apps like Facebook.
- PunchTornado 7y ago
  dashboards like that are a bit pointless without region filtering. what is your target? eu? usa? china?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Which is the reason why Google has finally added an update clause to their services contract, as OEMs are starting to not pay attention to their new versions. In Germany, on consumer stores at shopping malls you can still buy pre-paid devices with Lollipop.
twodave 7y ago
We support API versions 19-26 on our Android side, and it's a pretty major pain. The permissions model is different, background services work completely different, and then there is the tendency for things to just stop being supported (looking at you, GCM). Compared with the Apple ecosystem it's incredibly jolting. I mean, I get it. Android started from the opposite end of the spectrum from Apple, and now they're sort of meeting in the middle. But it's been a much smoother ride working with iOS over the last couple of years than it has been working with Android.
ggg2 7y ago
every article preaches the same absurd fallacy: "users update the OS more in so or so" Users have absolutely no say! Planed obsolence does. every single device could be running the latest version just fine. But the manufacturer intentionally decide to not offer (or allow!) the update on not cases. This is pure greed over consumer rights (or respect). want the latest security patch on your 2yr old $600 device? too bad, trhow it in the landfill and buy a new one (often with worse features)
mymythisisthis 7y ago
Should be more fragmented, until it gets to the point where I don't have to have ads kicking in my teeth daily.
bahmboo 7y ago
I have an ipad 3 (yah the original ipad on its 3rd iteration). Apple was supporting os updates until fairly recently. The thing is that none of the modern apps tested or cared about something that old. So even if was technically supported the experience was borderline unusable. Even the core ipad usage was klunky. Stuff gets old and we move on.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  Well, that's kind of the point: Despite the age, OS-updates to it shall make it work just like any new device, except for being slower. If features (that are also present in the older device) don't work at all instead of just slow, that's fragmentation. You should upgrade an old device because you need a new feature or you want more speed a modern device can offer you, but having to abandon the device because it doesn't work properly anymore should not be an option you're forced to consider, and that's the point, the vendors do force this upon you to drive their sales.
ChrisRR 7y ago
But does this fragmentation actually matter? For most apps which are at most accessing some sort of online data, like a web shop, chat apps, etc. you just target the lowest API that has the features you want and it's compatible with all newer Android OS releases. I would think the real fragmentation that developers have to consider is in things like screen size, or custom APIs by hardware vendors. In my experience, it's the difference between Samsung's bluetooth stack and Android's own
myko 7y ago
This is asinine. Android's support library makes fragmentation a non-issue for the vast majority of applications.
nrjames 7y ago
Last I checked, for our popular mobile game, there were over 28,000 different models of Android phones represented in the analytics from a single day. Multiply that by Android versions, manufacturers, hardware specs... it’s a mess that is hard to wrangle.
Schnitz 7y ago
In practice this is a non issue, even for larger apps with a big user base. This is just trolling.
- OrgNet 7y ago
  Why would it be a problem for larger apps that have a bigger budget?
- panpanna 7y ago
  The author is indeed trolling. I don't understand why this is on HN.
ezoe 7y ago
Old Android devices that cannot be upgraded is a headache for service that can't afford to lose customers who still use old smartphone. One of the colleague once estimated that just giving a new Android phone to all customers who is still using annoyingly old phone is better solution than supporting old Androids. He calculated the cost of supporting old Android(amount of time wasted multiplies by engineer's wage). He concluded that it's actually cheaper for a company to give every old android users of our service a new phone than diligently supporting old Android versions. Also, it greatly improve the QoL of engineer. Sadly, our company never executed this plan.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Well, salaries of employees are a fixed cost, so there wouldn't really be any money saved by giving away devices. At least, there'd be no money saved unless the company also then fired all of the engineers that were no longer needed because time didn't have to be spent diligently supporting old android versions.
ineedasername 7y ago
>12.X has about 80.5% market share... [of the iOS market] My POV is ... Apple leads the Mobile OS market share ... by a huge margin That's a rather dubious view of market share, parsing the definition to include only the most recent version of an OS. Under that mode of accounting, I'm sure MacOS enjoys market share "dominance" briefly after each October update of Windows. But if we extend Android version back just to 8.x then ~46% of all android devices are accounted for, and 46% of Android's total 75% of mobile install base is still quit a bit more than 80% of iOS's 23% mobile install base. And even that I don't really care about. iOS is a great OS. What I don't like are sloppy definitions and methodology in something that presents as data analysis. It's a stretch to say each manufacturer that puts what amounts to little more than a custom skin and vendor-specific apps constitutes its own distinct fragment. So too is it disingenuous to represent each point-release of Android as a separate fragment, especially when the author goes on to lump all iOS 12.x point versions together. I'd also say that fragmentation, in some small way at least, works in favor of android users that have older versions installed because apps can't just target the latest version given that vendors don't push the latest updates to all users. It means older devices can still get many/most new apps on their devices. Contrast this to Apple, where not updating to the latest version can have an impact on app availability much sooner, while updating the OS tends to degrade (in my subjective experience) user experience significantly when you hit the second or third such update. Last time I had to update my kid's ipad to a newer iOS version it basically killed it. It was necessary so she could play minecraft again, but the device became unbearably slow, and minecraft crashed anyway. (My solution was to "upgrade" to an $80 kindle fire kids version, which plays minecraft quite nicely. That I'll admit is absolutely its own fragment of Android though)
fopen64 7y ago
The days where we could not write Android 4-compatible apps because the population of Android 2.2 devices was too important to be ignored, are long gone. Android looks much more like iOS now: most people are using a present or past version of a flagship device like Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel. I don't care if an app does not run on Xing Ling that is 0.0003% of the population.
xs83 7y ago
Most people never have to deal with this though - I wonder what the % of these figures are things like Smart TV's and various other Android devices. For the most part it isn't a problem for us - we require Android 6+ and for the phone to have various sensors. Some of our customers can't afford the latest or greatest Android devices - that's fine - we will do our best to support them. Could Android do what iOS does? To a degree yes, they would just have to cripple phones forcing people to make the choice between newer software and a slower phone or leaving something that works just fine as it is....
gonvaled 7y ago
Android is, as all US technology, a counterparty risk.
twntee 7y ago
You are not looking at the right thing here IMO. The OS is fragmented no questions there, the Play services aren't. Also most of the components for the OS are updated using Playstore.
krschultz 7y ago
1) Do this analysis for your own user base, universal stats may not be relevant. 2) It's more helpful to look at aggregations on cuts that will impact your product and codebase. e.g. % of devices above API level 19, % of users with each screen size grouping, what % of our users are on tablets, etc. These answer questions when you should drop support for an API, when you should start using new features, how many different UI mocks you need. Those are the relevant questions. 3) Do test your UX across a couple different phones categories. Samsung & vanilla Android have different button placements and icons. 4) There are plenty of libraries and tools available to handle this problem. I won't say it's not something to think about, but it's usually pretty low on my list.
8bitrebellion 7y ago
But what this article doesn't take into account is that Android is obviously split over tons of devices while iOS is, of course, set for Apple devices
m-p-3 7y ago
I'm surprised to see Marshmallow (6.0) below Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0)
tempodox 7y ago
> ...owners (hopefully) buy a new Android device which offers latest updates. A new Android device will get one “latest update”. Before the user buys it. After that, it will be just as fragmented as the rest.
jessshorland 7y ago
I work at a company that distributes an Android SDK specifically for East/West/Southern Africa and South Asia. So far (and we are extremely early stage) we've seen 2,992 unique make/model combinations, and from there the OS ranges from v4.3 - 9.0 and everywhere in between. There's a huge backward compatibility problem in these markets -- we had to build our own dual sim API because of it. Device specific issues are extremely real, and as far as I can tell, Google does not have a great strategy for these markets that make up a not insignificant (and growing) portion of their market share. Android users who are sensitive to data usage/costs don't upgrade their OS often, and have secondhand or imported devices with some kind of customized OS. https://medium.com/use-hover/hover-launches-v1-0-stable-and-scalable-f65e33731090 https://medium.com/use-hover/hover-launches-v1-0-stable-and-...

225 points by tgp22 7y ago

These articles rarely go over what, if any, practical concerns there are. The Wintel market is even more fragmented, but that's not really an issue in practice because the abstractions are more or less in the right place.

samdung 7y ago
The articles states the vast majority of android phones do not receive any updates but Google is able to collect valuable data from these devices. I beleieve this is a practical concern.
- atomicUpdate 7y ago
  Why is this a concern? They never paid for Android to begin with and still get to use Google services like Maps, Play, GMail, etc.
djsumdog 7y ago
You can install stock Win 10 on any machine you buy, or most Linux distros with the same boot image thanks to UEFI and the PC spec. Android ARMs are NOT an architecture. They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels. Oreo and the /vendor partition may help with this some. Still, it's a far cry from the Linux/PCs days of the 90s. I've written about this before: https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/
- derefr 7y ago
  > They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels. Sounds like arcade cabinets. Maybe we need something that does for Android ARM devices what MAME does for those: specifies each device as an abstract wiring diagram of pins to bits of patched kernel acting as ROMs. And then make that whole thing into a kernel virtualization-provider module, which uses the stock kernel for anything not masked over by ROMs.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    This is what devicetree is supposed to be. However, as with the arctic machine, the incentives are misaligned - they actively don't want to be commoditized.
    - djsumdog 7y ago
      Windows phones did at least have UEFI + arm. You can unlock the bootloaders of many of them now. But there's still no driver support for mobile data and several other critical hardware components.
- monocasa 7y ago
  But none of that matters for app developers. (Also, Wintel machines are very much random pins soldered to random crap, they just do a better job papering over it with ACPI AML bytecode)
MiddleEndian 7y ago
Wintel is something that could be taken down a notch, but it seems everything outside of the x86 family is even worse. If I buy a Dell laptop or a Lenovo laptop, it will come with a bunch of useless junk installed that nobody in their right mind would ever want, like Lenovo's useless gigantic Wi-Fi icon in Windows (last observed by me in a T520). But not only can I uninstall all of that junk software, I am still running real Windows. And that means I can update it normally. Compare that to an Android device. You get a phone from a company like Samsung and you cannot uninstall the Facebook app no matter what you do. You get a phone from HTC and maybe they decide to push an update from 7.something to 8.0 and 8.0 introduces a new issue. That is fixed in 8.1 but you can never actually upgrade to 8.1 because it's not the real version of Android it's the HTC version of Android and they have ordained that your device shall never go past 8.0 and they pushed some firmware "security" update that prevents you from installing any other OS on your device. Additionally, some software seems to be dictated by your mobile carrier, which would be like allowing Comcast to control what you run on your PC. So whatever fragmentation there is on Wintel (or LinAmd), it is not nearly as hostile to the user as the Android ecosystem.
- bscphil 7y ago
  That's a good point. Imagine Microsoft allowed third-party computer manufacturers to ship custom-built versions of Windows with modifications and third-party drivers that didn't have to be released in any publicly usable format. We'd have a real mess! To be clear, I don't think this is a failing of open source. The problem is that Google allowed phone manufacturers to release practically anything they wanted based on the Android code base under the name "Android" and to ship with the common market (Google Play). Frankly I don't think they should have allowed any modifications, making Android closer to how Firefox is distributed. (Anyone can edit the source code of Firefox, and even release a fully built binary based on that edited code, but you can't call it Firefox.) Maybe fewer manufacturers would have bought in at the outset, or maybe some would have tried to fork Android, but it's easy to forget what a desperate situation they were in. Outside of Apple and maybe Blackberry, the mobile OS market was in shambles because nobody was ready with high quality smartphone software. Android was a huge win and probably saved multiple companies from bankruptcy, and I think they would have eventually bought in to a more strictly defined OS out of necessity.

on_and_off 7y ago

I work on an Android app aimed at the North American market. Android O, P and Q are 88% of our Android devices. By far and large, fragmentation is something I _never_ have to think about. Jetpack libraries are here to handle it for us, as an abstraction layer between the OS and third party apps. I would have mentioned that e.g. camera apps are an exception : here hardware fragmentation can be a pain. I was half surprised to see that Google is also working on that one with the camera x library. There have been cases where the fragmentation bites us; and there might be in the future (although in all fainess my iOS colleagues sometimes have to create specific fixes as well) but the last time I had to scratch my head because of a device specific bug was years ago. And at the time, I was already finding these articles deeply ridiculous.

orangecat 7y ago
camera apps are an exception : here hardware fragmentation can be a pain Yes. The backwards sensors in the Nexus 5x and 6 were particularly amusing/irritating: https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9696774/google-nexus-5x-upside-down-camera https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9696774/google-nexus-5x-u....
mattlondon 7y ago
+1 I have a few hobby apps on the app store that gave had a few thousand downloads. Not a huge sample but generally speaking it's N+ that has the vast majority of users. My apps are fairly standard or are games - most API levels since M seem to basically cover everything I need 99% of the time. I have no interest AT ALL in the manufacturer of the device. Fragmentation simply doesn't feel like an issue, at least to me.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Fragmentation becomes an issue when you're either building services that run in the background or interact with hardware (BT, WiFi, WiFi-direct, Camera, GNSS, Gyro/Accel). I feel fragmentation hard with my app.
  - on_and_off 7y ago

eugeniub 7y ago

The fault of fragmentation lies at many levels, including distributors. The bookstore at my alma mater in the Midwest is normally great at promoting modern tech products, but they recently started pushing two models of a phone with KitKat at $100+ pricepoints. That's Android 4.4, which was deprecated in 2015. Who are these phones for? They're not even suitable for computer science students, because trying to learn Android development with a KitKat device is incredibly suboptimal.

on_and_off 7y ago
A google search on 100$ android phones returned a "best cheap android phones" list. The first entry is the Nokia 2 (never tried one but I heard good things). For 85$ it ships with Oreo. That's kind of amazing : for a relatively modest sum, you get a lot of technology. It makes me wonder why anybody would recommend a costlier device shipping with 4.4

jherdman 7y ago

> My POV is ... Apple leads the Mobile OS market share ... by a huge margin. I'm having a really hard time understanding this statement. Does the author mean with respect to how updates are handled? It clearly cannot mean in terms of sheer number of installs, Android is clearly _leagues_ ahead of iOS in that regard.

josteink 7y ago
He’s basically claiming that latest iOS has higher market share than latest Android version (which may be true), and from that concludes that the rest of the android versions in the market somehow don’t count, so iOS is biggest. Android has its issues, but “math” like this isn’t the answer. This is drivel, really. Also: See Wintel for fragmentation. Everywhere in nature and tech diversity is good. But somehow not for mobile phone OSes.
- arendtio 7y ago
  > diversity is good It depends on what the cause is. If I have no option to update to a recent version and causing diversity that way, it is bad. If I can choose to install a custom version, it is good. So in Android's case, the diversity is just a symptom of the underlying fragmentation of responsibility for updates. However, phone manufacturers might see this a bit differently.
IloveHN84 7y ago
Wait, what? We are comparing really the 90% of Android Global Market Share vs 9% of iOS?
Gudin 7y ago
The conclusion is unexpected and stupid. Android doesn't brag it has 75% share. Actual data is that 85% of smartphones run Android and that's market share. Fact that they are not updated to the latest version doesn't change the market share.
- matwood 7y ago
  "Addressable" market share maybe? A developer can target iOS current version and current version-1, and cover the large majority of iOS devices. How far back does an Android developer have to target? Maybe it doesn't matter since the Android marketshare is so much larger that targeting current - 1 stills gets more devices than iOS.

pjmlp 7y ago

Khronos likes to talk about Vulkan support on Android. The reality is that thanks for it being an optional API, introduced in version 7, only flagships have proper support. And even then, each OEM provides a different version, with their own set of instructions. Hardly any better than GL ES. Now they are doing it compulsory on Android 9, upgradable via the store, with GL support being supported via ANGLE. Guess what, first you need to get a device with Android 9 on it. This just an example among many others across other API surface areas. So much for Java on mobiles being too much of fragmented system that Google was going to sort out with their solution, hence the need to undercut Sun.

zanny 7y ago
I don't get the negative sentiment here. When Vulkan was brand new Google didn't want to force it in 7.0 or they might have had even more devices still stuck on 6.0 today. The fact they made it mandatory and independent of vendor in 9 is laudable. Doing so absolutely costs them adoption of the latest releases but they did it anyway. When you say "first you need a device with Android 9" that is on the vendors to provide. And the scarcity of 9 can in part be contributed to compulsory Vulkan support. Most of Googles first party phones now run it, even though their general attitude of abandoning 4+ year old products is still egregious.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  If Google was anything like Microsoft, they would produce stuff like Android 2019 OEM requirements, and provide the OS directly from them. Like for example, the "PC 98 System Design Guide": https://www.amazon.com/PC-98-System-Design-Guide/dp/1572317167 https://www.amazon.com/PC-98-System-Design-Guide/dp/15723171... Fact is, just get a new phone is not an answer that consumers likes to hear. Not every country is like US with everyone on contracts getting free replacements every two years. Many of us enjoy the freedom of pre-paid replacable SIM cards, and use our phones until they either die or get stolen. In any case, I only used Vulkan as the most recent example, I can give plenty of other ones, and I develop native Android as hobby. Other Android developers with more in depth knowledge have plenty of war stories.
7y ago

DiabloD3 7y ago

The article concludes, as far as I can tell, it isn't fragmented, it just has a bunch of recent enough versions on similar enough devices to run most apps. Apps don't care what version of Android you run, they care what API support you have, and apps can detect API support at runtime and adapt. OTOH, the article fails to mention that Apple refuses to let you support devices after EOL, and even some of the oldest Android devices in existence can run even the newest Android, as long as you're willing to upgrade the ROM yourself. Phone hardware typically is literally falling apart after 3-5 years, any truly old phones are ones that users have chose to keep on life support but not upgrade their ROMs (or made the mistake of buying a phone from a consumer-hostile brand, which is, ultimately, the only valid argument for Android fragmentation). The only company that is truly consumer hostile is Samsung. And, frankly, I don't know why anyone would buy Samsung or Apple or even Google's own Pixel series... OnePlus charged me $550 for a phone (the 6T) that has the same size screen (and its an AMOLED too), literally same parts, but with more RAM and storage, and a bigger battery, that is otherwise identical to a Pixel 3XL or a Samsung S9+ or whatever top tier extra large phone that costs $800-1300; and that new 7 Pro? Still an amazing deal, and OnePlus supports Android on their phones ridiculously long times.

pekalicious 7y ago
What makes Samsung phones consumer hostile? Their ridiculous prices? Because I wouldn't call that hostile, rather simply overpriced. And I would agree that they are. However, I still have every galaxy note I have ever owned, working, and in great condition (Note 2, 5, and now 8). My dad is actually using the 5. All of them got upgraded at least once to a newer Android OS and they are still solid devices. Granted, other than Note, I've only owned a Startosphere for the hw keyboard, so I can't compare it to others, but even after I realized that the Note 8 was crazy expensive and made me double think what my next phone will be, I worry if the longevity can be matched.
- DiabloD3 7y ago
  Samsung phones ship with ROMs that try to remove as much of the native Android experience as possible, and tend to eat battery life for no good reason. Swapping ROMs to AOSP-like experiences vastly improves battery life and performance on many Samsung phones. Several Galaxy and Note devices also cannot ROM swap at all due to locked bootloaders, which makes that the most consumer hostile thing of all. I'm not sure which models this effects, but it is enough to put Samsung on my forever shitlist.

rarestblog 7y ago

Well, if you remove all iOS versions with <3.42% penetration, then you should remove the same from the Android table and use 2 decimals for Android like for iOS. https://i.imgur.com/0Ar0ta5.png https://i.imgur.com/0Ar0ta5.png My point being: there ARE other iOS versions in use. I have a backup working iPhone 4 turned on right now. It won't upgrade beyond iOS 5 (I think it's iOS 5). But somehow the author ignores all those 0.1% iOS versions, yet shows them for Android (with 4 decimals no less).

stesch 7y ago
By the way: iPhone 4 supports iOS 7.1.2, released 4 years after the iPhone 4.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I'm not sure why the GP said his iPhone 4 won't upgrade past iOS 5, but it's worth noting: while an iPhone 4 can be upgraded to iOS 7, actually doing so is a bad idea unless you want your phone to run slow as molasses. You'll be much better off on iOS 6 or 5. (I suppose there may be a security argument for upgrading as far as possible, but it's not like iOS 7 is up-to-date either. If you're concerned about security, you shouldn't be using an iPhone 4.)
  - rarestblog 7y ago
    Correct. It won't upgrade past 7.1.2 not 5. My mistake.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    > You'll be much better off on iOS 6 or 5. Sure. But if you are making an app for say a government service that has as a requirement to reach 98% of mobile users, and you reach the goal if you count compatible devices (not people who choise not to upgrade) then it helps.
- rarestblog 7y ago
  Correct, sorry, didn't bother to look at the time. It is 7.1.2. The point still stands, it's old and I'm probably in 0.1% that the article left out in iOS markets.

rocky1138 7y ago

> The vast majority of iPhone users update to the latest version quite fast and flawlessly. Has this person ever been around iPhone owners when a new update comes out? I seem to remember a ton of lamentation at every step of slower speed, worse battery, laggy UI, moved features, removed features, and the like. Yeah, there's a lot of different Android versions out there. Who cares? Other than security updates, it's pretty much a non-issue. Developers target the version they want to support and publish their app online.

mberning 7y ago
Maybe on one particular major version update. The vast majority of updates are completely painless, as evidenced by such a large percentage of people having no reservation about updating to the latest version.

com2kid 7y ago

Something that doesn't get talked about as much is the differences between how manufacturers customize their OS. It has been talked about a fair bit on HN (https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/), but it really is a huge problem. I can be listening to music on my phone and One+ will just kill Pandora, or Spotify. I have to manually "lock" music apps and workout apps in One+'s task switching UI to keep them from being randomly killed while in use. Hilariously enough I have one game on my phone that will always run in the background and never be killed, sucking down a lot power. Somehow even when not in the foreground it consumes massive CPU. I don't think it is even malicious, just oddly programmed. I wish my music apps could pull off the same trick though!

Knufen 7y ago
I have a One+ and I can't really recommend Greenify (App) enough. Forces all apps to shutdown, even those running in the background.
- com2kid 7y ago
  I have plenty of memory, I don't want apps force closed. If I switch from a game to a browser to look something up, being able to switch back to the (paused) game 5 minutes later is a feature, not a bug. Apps that obey backgrounding and stop doing work (e.g. burning CPU/Power) are fine.
snek 7y ago
I've had a 1+1, 1+3, and 1+5, and I never had this issue on any of them.
rubyn00bie 7y ago
I don't think a lot of people understand how apps run in the background on Android. I know having worked on one recently, coming from iOS, I had a lot of assumptions about what it would or wouldn't be doing... and they were all wrong (of course). Turns out Android, at least however this app is setup, maybe by default, leaves the app fully running. Like zero effort to suspend it automatically. A part of the UI crashed and a hunt to find the bug made me realize this... I fixed the bug, but still haven't really looked into how to really suspend it.

jmiskovic 7y ago

I'm not a professional app developer. A year ago I invested few months to develop an app I wanted to have. Today it has few thousand users. Fragmentation doesn't bother me. Yes, on some devices the app crashes, on others the sound lag is unbearable. I don't really care, as long as it works fine on most devices. Two things infuriate me, though. Enough to never again spend another minute developing for android. Every time I enter android studio, it wants to update. The studio wants to update. Suddenly it's incompatible with build system (yes, the build system has dependencies on IDE version!). Then gradle wants to update. Then SDK. Then IDE again. It's never-ending cycle of updates. Each update has 20% chance to cause build errors on this project (Love2D for Android). Each error has a cryptic message, and it's resolved by something completely unrelated to error message. Usually it's solved by bumping up the minimal SDK version and thus cutting off some percentage of potential users. I dread each and every attempt to re-build my app. The second thing is recent requirement to provide 64-bit version of each app. My app depends on framework written in C++ with additional libraries in C. I can't and won't spend time to get the build for 64-bit version working. Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide". So I won't be able to update existing app to existing users ever again, for non-technical reasons. Fragmentation I can deal with. All web developers deal with it daily. But Google's treatment of development is horrible and I don't want any part of it. Because of this I've transitioned to web as platform. At least I can be safe that anything I build will be runnable in 10 or 20 years.

chipperyman573 7y ago
>Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide". So I won't be able to update existing app to existing users ever again, for non-technical reasons. Isn't the reason entirely technical? 64-bit apps can use 64-bit only instruction sets, which are newer and usually faster, resulting in a performance improvement. BTW, apple did the same thing years ago on iOS and is planning to kill 32-bit apps on MacOS soon.
- izacus 7y ago
  I think Google wants to allow OEMs to build devices that only support arm64-v8a arch - this will make the OS image significantly smaller because now they need to ship several components in duplicate - 32 and 64-bit versions. This is beneficial to total size of OS on the flash. Apple did this years ago.

stesch 7y ago

I'm wondering if letting your app support very old OS versions is a good thing. You get more customers but aren't the ones with the old OS more likely be the ones causing the most problems (= work) because they aren't very tech savvy?

klingonopera 7y ago
It provides economic opportunities for third party services. Supporting your local IT/Phone-store around the corner in assisting me is preferable to me than to buy a new phone.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

somedudetbh 7y ago

From the article: "So the Android ecosystem is split between at least 1,728 combinations of OS - Brand - Device Model" It's actually _much worse_ than this. Here's a review of the "Samsung Galaxy S10+": https://www.anandtech.com/show/14072/the-samsung-galaxy-s10plus-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/14072/the-samsung-galaxy-s10p... This "device model" is actually two devices with completely different SoCs. There is no meaningful sense in which these two phones are one device. Sometimes the manufacturers document this, sometimes they just start selling a phone that identifies itself by the same name as an existing phone but with a GPU that has completely different performance characteristics.

IshKebab 7y ago
It's probably not worse than that because he makes the totally incorrect assumption that Android version and device are independent, which is obviously not the case. Most people update their phones to the latest available version for their phone, so it would be 144 OS-device-manufacturer combos (more or less).

dmitryminkovsky 7y ago

I know this post is about Android versions but I recently launched a new service and have been watching user agents and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see no matter the Android version, it’s almost always running Chrome 73/Firefox 66. I have a user running Android 5.5.1, another on some version of 4! Yet they’re on modern browsers. This isn’t true for anyone on an old iOS. Those users are stuck with old browsers, which is quite sad for the user and developer.

robocat 7y ago
FYI: Android 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 will soon get no more updates to Chrome[1]. Android 4.0 is stuck on an old version of Chrome. For WebView, Android 4.4 is stuck on Chrome 30/33 and anything older still uses AOSP. Samsung users often use the Samsung browser, which is often a very obsolete version that came with the phone. 1. https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-android-dropping-support-android-4-1-4-3-jelly-bean/ https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-android-droppin...
- ggg2 7y ago
  hopefully firefox will continue to run fine on those (and get faster over time) chrome on android is dead to me. so many antifeatures it's maddening.
- oblio 7y ago
  Android 4.1-3 are from 2012, early 2013. So 6-7 years old. Those old devices are barely functional to view modern webpages, anyway.
  - dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
    That’s the assumption I made but is that actually true you think? This is true of iOS devices after OS upgrades, I’ve experienced this myself: Apple ruins old devices with software updates. But I somehow doubt that a phone from 2012 must be ruined with bad software. Any idea?

ajnin 7y ago

I've been tracking the data from Google's Android dashboards over time : https://www.bidouille.org/misc/androidcharts https://www.bidouille.org/misc/androidcharts From these observations, it seems that Android's fragmentation is getting worse, and that newer versions of Android have more and more trouble establishing themselves as the dominant version. In fact, JellyBean was the last version to reach more than 50%.

izacus 7y ago
It is hard to understate how MISLEADING these dashboards are. They are so, so, so wrong. I've professionally worked on several apps/libraries which reached millions of Android users and not one of them (not one!) had a distribution that's even close to what those dashboards show. Any kind of app that's not exclusively targeting emerging markets on 512MB phones will have significantly higher percentage of newer Androids. If you're targeting US, EU, China, Japan, Korea and S. America you'll probably have Androids before 6.x in marginal <10% total figures. Any kind of app that's being released together with its iOS version will probably have double to triple percentage of new Android versions and pretty much non-existant usage stats on Androids before 5.0. Those dashboards reflect pretty much no app published on Play store - not even apps like Facebook.
PunchTornado 7y ago
dashboards like that are a bit pointless without region filtering. what is your target? eu? usa? china?
pjmlp 7y ago
Which is the reason why Google has finally added an update clause to their services contract, as OEMs are starting to not pay attention to their new versions. In Germany, on consumer stores at shopping malls you can still buy pre-paid devices with Lollipop.

twodave 7y ago

We support API versions 19-26 on our Android side, and it's a pretty major pain. The permissions model is different, background services work completely different, and then there is the tendency for things to just stop being supported (looking at you, GCM). Compared with the Apple ecosystem it's incredibly jolting. I mean, I get it. Android started from the opposite end of the spectrum from Apple, and now they're sort of meeting in the middle. But it's been a much smoother ride working with iOS over the last couple of years than it has been working with Android.

ggg2 7y ago

every article preaches the same absurd fallacy: "users update the OS more in so or so" Users have absolutely no say! Planed obsolence does. every single device could be running the latest version just fine. But the manufacturer intentionally decide to not offer (or allow!) the update on not cases. This is pure greed over consumer rights (or respect). want the latest security patch on your 2yr old $600 device? too bad, trhow it in the landfill and buy a new one (often with worse features)

mymythisisthis 7y ago

Should be more fragmented, until it gets to the point where I don't have to have ads kicking in my teeth daily.

bahmboo 7y ago

I have an ipad 3 (yah the original ipad on its 3rd iteration). Apple was supporting os updates until fairly recently. The thing is that none of the modern apps tested or cared about something that old. So even if was technically supported the experience was borderline unusable. Even the core ipad usage was klunky. Stuff gets old and we move on.

klingonopera 7y ago
Well, that's kind of the point: Despite the age, OS-updates to it shall make it work just like any new device, except for being slower. If features (that are also present in the older device) don't work at all instead of just slow, that's fragmentation. You should upgrade an old device because you need a new feature or you want more speed a modern device can offer you, but having to abandon the device because it doesn't work properly anymore should not be an option you're forced to consider, and that's the point, the vendors do force this upon you to drive their sales.

ChrisRR 7y ago

But does this fragmentation actually matter? For most apps which are at most accessing some sort of online data, like a web shop, chat apps, etc. you just target the lowest API that has the features you want and it's compatible with all newer Android OS releases. I would think the real fragmentation that developers have to consider is in things like screen size, or custom APIs by hardware vendors. In my experience, it's the difference between Samsung's bluetooth stack and Android's own

myko 7y ago

This is asinine. Android's support library makes fragmentation a non-issue for the vast majority of applications.

nrjames 7y ago

Last I checked, for our popular mobile game, there were over 28,000 different models of Android phones represented in the analytics from a single day. Multiply that by Android versions, manufacturers, hardware specs... it’s a mess that is hard to wrangle.

Schnitz 7y ago

In practice this is a non issue, even for larger apps with a big user base. This is just trolling.

OrgNet 7y ago
Why would it be a problem for larger apps that have a bigger budget?
panpanna 7y ago
The author is indeed trolling. I don't understand why this is on HN.

ezoe 7y ago

Old Android devices that cannot be upgraded is a headache for service that can't afford to lose customers who still use old smartphone. One of the colleague once estimated that just giving a new Android phone to all customers who is still using annoyingly old phone is better solution than supporting old Androids. He calculated the cost of supporting old Android(amount of time wasted multiplies by engineer's wage). He concluded that it's actually cheaper for a company to give every old android users of our service a new phone than diligently supporting old Android versions. Also, it greatly improve the QoL of engineer. Sadly, our company never executed this plan.

ineedasername 7y ago
Well, salaries of employees are a fixed cost, so there wouldn't really be any money saved by giving away devices. At least, there'd be no money saved unless the company also then fired all of the engineers that were no longer needed because time didn't have to be spent diligently supporting old android versions.

ineedasername 7y ago

>12.X has about 80.5% market share... [of the iOS market] My POV is ... Apple leads the Mobile OS market share ... by a huge margin That's a rather dubious view of market share, parsing the definition to include only the most recent version of an OS. Under that mode of accounting, I'm sure MacOS enjoys market share "dominance" briefly after each October update of Windows. But if we extend Android version back just to 8.x then ~46% of all android devices are accounted for, and 46% of Android's total 75% of mobile install base is still quit a bit more than 80% of iOS's 23% mobile install base. And even that I don't really care about. iOS is a great OS. What I don't like are sloppy definitions and methodology in something that presents as data analysis. It's a stretch to say each manufacturer that puts what amounts to little more than a custom skin and vendor-specific apps constitutes its own distinct fragment. So too is it disingenuous to represent each point-release of Android as a separate fragment, especially when the author goes on to lump all iOS 12.x point versions together. I'd also say that fragmentation, in some small way at least, works in favor of android users that have older versions installed because apps can't just target the latest version given that vendors don't push the latest updates to all users. It means older devices can still get many/most new apps on their devices. Contrast this to Apple, where not updating to the latest version can have an impact on app availability much sooner, while updating the OS tends to degrade (in my subjective experience) user experience significantly when you hit the second or third such update. Last time I had to update my kid's ipad to a newer iOS version it basically killed it. It was necessary so she could play minecraft again, but the device became unbearably slow, and minecraft crashed anyway. (My solution was to "upgrade" to an $80 kindle fire kids version, which plays minecraft quite nicely. That I'll admit is absolutely its own fragment of Android though)

fopen64 7y ago

The days where we could not write Android 4-compatible apps because the population of Android 2.2 devices was too important to be ignored, are long gone. Android looks much more like iOS now: most people are using a present or past version of a flagship device like Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel. I don't care if an app does not run on Xing Ling that is 0.0003% of the population.

xs83 7y ago

Most people never have to deal with this though - I wonder what the % of these figures are things like Smart TV's and various other Android devices. For the most part it isn't a problem for us - we require Android 6+ and for the phone to have various sensors. Some of our customers can't afford the latest or greatest Android devices - that's fine - we will do our best to support them. Could Android do what iOS does? To a degree yes, they would just have to cripple phones forcing people to make the choice between newer software and a slower phone or leaving something that works just fine as it is....

gonvaled 7y ago

Android is, as all US technology, a counterparty risk.

twntee 7y ago

You are not looking at the right thing here IMO. The OS is fragmented no questions there, the Play services aren't. Also most of the components for the OS are updated using Playstore.

krschultz 7y ago

1) Do this analysis for your own user base, universal stats may not be relevant. 2) It's more helpful to look at aggregations on cuts that will impact your product and codebase. e.g. % of devices above API level 19, % of users with each screen size grouping, what % of our users are on tablets, etc. These answer questions when you should drop support for an API, when you should start using new features, how many different UI mocks you need. Those are the relevant questions. 3) Do test your UX across a couple different phones categories. Samsung & vanilla Android have different button placements and icons. 4) There are plenty of libraries and tools available to handle this problem. I won't say it's not something to think about, but it's usually pretty low on my list.

8bitrebellion 7y ago

But what this article doesn't take into account is that Android is obviously split over tons of devices while iOS is, of course, set for Apple devices

m-p-3 7y ago

I'm surprised to see Marshmallow (6.0) below Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0)

tempodox 7y ago

> ...owners (hopefully) buy a new Android device which offers latest updates. A new Android device will get one “latest update”. Before the user buys it. After that, it will be just as fragmented as the rest.

jessshorland 7y ago

I work at a company that distributes an Android SDK specifically for East/West/Southern Africa and South Asia. So far (and we are extremely early stage) we've seen 2,992 unique make/model combinations, and from there the OS ranges from v4.3 - 9.0 and everywhere in between. There's a huge backward compatibility problem in these markets -- we had to build our own dual sim API because of it. Device specific issues are extremely real, and as far as I can tell, Google does not have a great strategy for these markets that make up a not insignificant (and growing) portion of their market share. Android users who are sensitive to data usage/costs don't upgrade their OS often, and have secondhand or imported devices with some kind of customized OS. https://medium.com/use-hover/hover-launches-v1-0-stable-and-scalable-f65e33731090 https://medium.com/use-hover/hover-launches-v1-0-stable-and-...