3 ms·

I love my Android phone and I love developing for it but I sort of think that sometimes we have a little bit of Stockholm syndrome when I hear another Android d

I love my Android phone and I love developing for it but I sort of think that sometimes we have a little bit of Stockholm syndrome when I hear another Android developer say "fragmentation is great!." It really isn't, especially not with the differences between 2.3 and 3+, but I like being able to put my own apps on my phone without paying $99 a year, so I like my phone quite a bit.

romeodelight 14y ago
I think for Asian developers, specially in China, fragmentation is a HUGE problem. There are literally hundreds of variations of cheap Android phones out there with different screen sizes, OS versions, etc. We replace our phones regularly here in the US and have access to the latest phones from Samsung, etc. but that is not the case in most parts of Asia.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  I don't think it is that simple. In Asia, which is ground zero for non-Google Android devices, fragmentation is certainly a problem, but the absence of fragmentation would have been far worse. Without fragmenting an open-source Android, manufacturers just wouldn't have been able to make and sell the cheap smartphones Asian developers are targeting.
ajross 14y ago
I'd tend to agree. But at the same time I do get sick of all the articles like this one harping on "fragmentation" instead of actual porting issues. That's the clue that tells me the linked article was written by Apple fans with an axe to grind. If people viewed this as an important problem worth solving, we'd see articles about how to do aspect-independent UIs, or apps that cleanly upgrade to gestures in Gingerbread+. Or cute workarounds for rendering bugs on the SGX vs. Mali vs. Tegra. But we don't see any of that, because quite frankly most people don't care. Outside of stuff that directly faces hardware APIs, Android apps port quite well in the real world. Contrast, for example, the web development world. There, platform compatibility issues have been a huge problem for years, spawned a bunch of frameworks to abstract the differences, and inspired sites like caniuse.com. The clear lack of these in the Android world is, I argue, an existence proof that "fragmentation" is a red herring.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

romeodelight 14y ago

I think for Asian developers, specially in China, fragmentation is a HUGE problem. There are literally hundreds of variations of cheap Android phones out there with different screen sizes, OS versions, etc. We replace our phones regularly here in the US and have access to the latest phones from Samsung, etc. but that is not the case in most parts of Asia.

fpgeek 14y ago
I don't think it is that simple. In Asia, which is ground zero for non-Google Android devices, fragmentation is certainly a problem, but the absence of fragmentation would have been far worse. Without fragmenting an open-source Android, manufacturers just wouldn't have been able to make and sell the cheap smartphones Asian developers are targeting.

ajross 14y ago

I'd tend to agree. But at the same time I do get sick of all the articles like this one harping on "fragmentation" instead of actual porting issues. That's the clue that tells me the linked article was written by Apple fans with an axe to grind. If people viewed this as an important problem worth solving, we'd see articles about how to do aspect-independent UIs, or apps that cleanly upgrade to gestures in Gingerbread+. Or cute workarounds for rendering bugs on the SGX vs. Mali vs. Tegra. But we don't see any of that, because quite frankly most people don't care. Outside of stuff that directly faces hardware APIs, Android apps port quite well in the real world. Contrast, for example, the web development world. There, platform compatibility issues have been a huge problem for years, spawned a bunch of frameworks to abstract the differences, and inspired sites like caniuse.com. The clear lack of these in the Android world is, I argue, an existence proof that "fragmentation" is a red herring.

deleted 14y ago
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