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I'll be the first to criticize Google for not working even harder with manufacturers to standardize Android more or faster, especially when it comes to upgrades

I'll be the first to criticize Google for not working even harder with manufacturers to standardize Android more or faster, especially when it comes to upgrades. But it's important to remember that iOS only covers a handful of devices at most, and they are all made by the same company, and use 2 or 3 different chips at most. Any other OS which tries to cover more devices and configurations than that will inherently be less standardized and "harder" for developers, especially in its first few years of existence. There used to be a lot of different GPU manufacturers for PC's out there also 15 years ago. These sort of things tend to become more standardized after at least a few years have past, and not only the OS is more compatible with different hardware, but there are fewer manufacturers to worry about, too, once the leaders of the market have been set, and the manufacturers themselves work on making their own hardware and drivers more compatible with previous versions once the market is stable. The author actually says that Android fragmentation is less of a problem than on the web or even on Windows! If that's true, then Android is already doing very well regarding supporting a ton of devices that are still compatible with each other. But again, I still want Google to constantly work hard on making it as small of a problem as possible.

jen_h 14y ago
Agreed. In my experience, there are so many points of change/breakage that fragmentation is absolutely a problem if you're doing anything remotely complicated. We do voice and use SSL - both get broken from time to time on a subset of devices for a multitude of reasons...a phone manufacturer re-introduces a bug they fixed two full releases ago, an OS update adds incorrect proxies that break SSL, some models introduce flaky over-sensitive touchscreens or enable a vibrate feature that's a bit off-the-charts, and so on. Troubleshooting these issues take time & serious investigative work (not to mention awesome, helpful users), too. And you can't anticipate what's going to break ahead of time the way you can with iOS - you don't have access to carrier updates across the board and you can't possibly test every device/OS combo or upgrade case. You could take, for instance, ICS straight from Google, but that's missing all the breakage that gets added from the carriers and phone manufacturers...you basically have to await the screams, then apply the tourniquet. There's not much "preventative care" available. One of the great things Google has done to help in this regard (whether intended or not) is the ability to push out releases to customers within minutes without review. While there are many reasons this lack of review can be dangerous for users, from the development side, it's really fantastic to be able to push out fixes to affected users as soon as you've got them implemented and tested. I.e., at least you can apply pressure to that gaping wound quickly. Very much looking forward to what the Motorola acquisition has in store and am staying optimistic--one thing I've noticed is that the "dominant handset" changes fast - for us, sometimes, in a matter of months. And when we have a pretty stable dominant handset, life gets easier (the HTC era and the calm before the ICS storm was kind of nice). If a stable, Google-controlled and well-tested Motorola phone becomes the dominant for a significant amount of time, this has the potential to be a very good thing for developers.
taligent 14y ago
You mean like Windows ? Windows covers 100x more combinations of hardware than Android and suffers from almost none of the same issues.
- bookwormAT 14y ago
  I disagree. I would even say that it is as least as easy to support most Android-based devices than it is to support most Hardware running Windows. In both platforms you run into very little issues for most apps, and you need to add support for lot's of different configurations if you write on the system level (Game developers can tell you a tale or two about this).
- betterth 14y ago
  I know, right? I'm going through the list of issues that happen for Android, and these aren't common PC issues. Resolution issues and render capabilities per screen size? Games pick resolutions and settings dynamically for best performance. We crossed these bridges long ago. But at any rate, it seems like the OP is trying to equivocate "well it's natural when you do things like this", but I'm not buying it. When your direct competitor doesn't have that problem, you can't wave it away by saying "it's inherent in the model".
  - gpmoo7 14y ago
    iOS is not a direct competitor of Android. Apple is selling iOS devices. Google is distributing the Android platform to hardware manufacturers so they can sell mobile/connected devices. So yes, there is no way that Android hardware & software fragmentation is going away. Just like there is no way that web browsers fragmentation is going away (hello HTML5 moving standard!). I'm also pretty sure that iOS fragmentation will become more and more important (new iPhone screen... Apple TV ...).

jen_h 14y ago

Agreed. In my experience, there are so many points of change/breakage that fragmentation is absolutely a problem if you're doing anything remotely complicated. We do voice and use SSL - both get broken from time to time on a subset of devices for a multitude of reasons...a phone manufacturer re-introduces a bug they fixed two full releases ago, an OS update adds incorrect proxies that break SSL, some models introduce flaky over-sensitive touchscreens or enable a vibrate feature that's a bit off-the-charts, and so on. Troubleshooting these issues take time & serious investigative work (not to mention awesome, helpful users), too. And you can't anticipate what's going to break ahead of time the way you can with iOS - you don't have access to carrier updates across the board and you can't possibly test every device/OS combo or upgrade case. You could take, for instance, ICS straight from Google, but that's missing all the breakage that gets added from the carriers and phone manufacturers...you basically have to await the screams, then apply the tourniquet. There's not much "preventative care" available. One of the great things Google has done to help in this regard (whether intended or not) is the ability to push out releases to customers within minutes without review. While there are many reasons this lack of review can be dangerous for users, from the development side, it's really fantastic to be able to push out fixes to affected users as soon as you've got them implemented and tested. I.e., at least you can apply pressure to that gaping wound quickly. Very much looking forward to what the Motorola acquisition has in store and am staying optimistic--one thing I've noticed is that the "dominant handset" changes fast - for us, sometimes, in a matter of months. And when we have a pretty stable dominant handset, life gets easier (the HTC era and the calm before the ICS storm was kind of nice). If a stable, Google-controlled and well-tested Motorola phone becomes the dominant for a significant amount of time, this has the potential to be a very good thing for developers.

taligent 14y ago

You mean like Windows ? Windows covers 100x more combinations of hardware than Android and suffers from almost none of the same issues.

bookwormAT 14y ago
I disagree. I would even say that it is as least as easy to support most Android-based devices than it is to support most Hardware running Windows. In both platforms you run into very little issues for most apps, and you need to add support for lot's of different configurations if you write on the system level (Game developers can tell you a tale or two about this).
betterth 14y ago
I know, right? I'm going through the list of issues that happen for Android, and these aren't common PC issues. Resolution issues and render capabilities per screen size? Games pick resolutions and settings dynamically for best performance. We crossed these bridges long ago. But at any rate, it seems like the OP is trying to equivocate "well it's natural when you do things like this", but I'm not buying it. When your direct competitor doesn't have that problem, you can't wave it away by saying "it's inherent in the model".
- gpmoo7 14y ago
  iOS is not a direct competitor of Android. Apple is selling iOS devices. Google is distributing the Android platform to hardware manufacturers so they can sell mobile/connected devices. So yes, there is no way that Android hardware & software fragmentation is going away. Just like there is no way that web browsers fragmentation is going away (hello HTML5 moving standard!). I'm also pretty sure that iOS fragmentation will become more and more important (new iPhone screen... Apple TV ...).