6 ms·

Android Jelly Bean passes 10% adoption and Gingerbread finally falls under 50%

30 points by Pr0 14y ago

nsomaru 14y ago
I wonder if anyone who develops for Android could shed some light on the difficulties they encounter when developing for a fragmented platform?
- cryptoz 14y ago
  Why not ask a web developer instead? Android is a lot less fragmented than the world wide web.
  - gte910h 14y ago
    While this is true, owning and testing all the android devices is a lot harder than having a system with many web browsers on it. Also asking customers to upgrade is usually downloading new software for websites, but is buying new hardware for many android users (as there is no released update nor will there ever be for their devices)
    - chimeracoder 14y ago
      > a system with many web browsers on it. Try multiple systems (multiple operating systems), with combinatorially many possibilities for the interesections of {operating system, browser type, browser version, screen size, resolution}.
      - gte910h 14y ago
        Which is exactly the same situation for android. And android is a far smaller area so tricks like just using the center third in both directions for large screens doesn't work.
        chimeracoder 14y ago
        > Which is exactly the same situation for android. Not at all - the difference between any two Android devices is far less than the difference between any two potential viewers of a website. > And android is a far smaller area so tricks like just using the center third in both directions for large screens doesn't work. Android also has an extensive set of well-defined guidelines for layout and constructing applications - the more you rely on the core API to handle these tasks, the more portable your app will be across Android devices. That's a lot more than can be said for browser rendering in the general case.
  - valgaze 14y ago
    Seems like a crucial distinction is that you can ask a user to use, upgrade, or install a different browser but not so easily ask them to get a new phone
    - rednukleus 14y ago
      Try telling that to a guy using IE on his locked down office computer.
      - valgaze 14y ago
        I'll tell him go here (lifesaver): http://www.google.com/chromeframe?quickenable=true http://www.google.com/chromeframe?quickenable=true
- OriginalSyn 14y ago
  Generally speaking you don't need to own and test all devices, the emulator does just fine. There are a few quirks here and there but as cryptoz alludes to I've never had more headaches than trying to support all the versions of IE and modern browsers.
- krschultz 14y ago
  There are pretty major differences between pre Ice Cream Sandwich and post Ice Cream Sandwich. My app is almost entirely Fragments, the Action Bar, rich notifications. All of these things didn't exist in 2.2 or 2.3. Thankfully between Google's support libraries and Action Bar Sherlock most of it can be papered over. I haven't had too much trouble with it so far.
  - radley 14y ago
    We don't use fragments too much since they're so incomplete. We use ABS for everything. Do you support < 4.0?
    - myko 14y ago
      What is incomplete about Fragments? My company uses ABS for most of our apps, and support < 4.0 - most of our applications rely on Fragments heavily.
      - radley 14y ago
        Each time we go to use them we find something is missing. PreferenceFragment is a good example. Google insists we use it but it's not backwards compatible, thus requiring two separate activities. Are you using Fragments for phone/tablet/TV differences, or do you stick strictly to phones?
        myko 14y ago
        All 3, and I agree about PreferenceFragment - it slipped my mind but it is a pain in the ass. I haven't run into many other issues(well, except Maps, though I believe this is handled with the new Maps API but I haven't worked on it yet).
- radley 14y ago
  Our best-selling app is a widget app so we probably have to contend with the most fragmentation: OS, screen size, device UI layer, device launchers, indie launchers, custom grid sizes, and mods. Then double that for screen orientations. OS differences, screen sizes, and layouts are handled by a lot of XML resources. Memory limitations is a big problem in older devices and OSes. Flexible layout design is also a challenge since Google & Samsung/HTC have opposing ideas of how big a widget should appear. Between Mike & I, we have 30+ devices for testing. I have the majority since I work on the UI and need to see how our widgets look for every possible layout. We don't need to buy one of every device made, we just cover new screen types (Droid DNA), platforms (Kindle Fire), and OSes (Nexus 4). We also make sure we have any standout devices (Google Nexus, Galaxy S3). We've been collecting phones & tablets since 2010, so we're pretty well covered for older devices. We don't mod or force-update our devices; we remain stock. When a major device updates, we update too. We don't support mods/ROMs since it's too difficult to solve bugs on moving targets. Most users understand Android has been changing exponentially over the past two years. The Galaxy Nexus is the tipping point. Anything made prior is simply outdated. Android 2.3 is our minimum supported OS, but we leave 2.2 open for those willing to try. Similarly, a few top developers are making new apps that are strictly 4.x & up.
reidmain 14y ago
The adoption rate of the latest version of Android may not be that high but does anyone know how MANY devices are running 4.0 or higher? I routinely tout the high adoption rate of iOS devices and how it justifies increasing the minimum iOS versions for apps because you still have a massive potential userbase. But because Android has more phones in the marketplace than iOS is it possibly now for developers to make Android 4.0 the minimum and still get a respected number of users?
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  > But because Android has more phones in the marketplace than iOS is it possibly now for developers to make Android 4.0 the minimum and still get a respected number of users? There's no easy answer to that question because it depends on what your target use case actually is. Remember that the goal of Android is to be a universal platform for hardware, which means that the target devices for Android are much more heterogeneous than iOS - and therefore the intended use case as well. I use an out-of-date Android device as a portable music player and an up-to-date one as my regular phone. Even that's not that wildly different if you start imagining people running Android on their household appliances. So, in my case, even though I technically still run Gingerbread, I'm fine with Android applications requiring 4.2+, since the only device that runs Gingerbread is essentially a single-purpose dedicated device. I imagine we'll start to see more of this behavior in the future.
  - reidmain 14y ago
    "I imagine we'll start to see more of this behavior in the future." I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. Do you mean consumers will use/buy older Android devices for very specific tasks? I think the exact opposite of this will happen. Your average consumer is not going to want to have multiple devices. They just want to carry their phone around and have it do everything for them.
    - chimeracoder 14y ago
      > Your average consumer is not going to want to have multiple devices. Your "average consumer" already does. The point is that Android in three years will be serving an even wider range of devices and household appliances.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jasonkostempski 14y ago
Those numbers must include the Meep! devices kids got for Christmas (Android 4.0). I don't know how many units they sold but I suspect just about all of those have been or will be returned [1]. Just about the only thing I could do on it was connect to Google Play. [1] Here's their 'Hot News' page full of apologies http://www.meeptablet.com/us/hotnews.asp http://www.meeptablet.com/us/hotnews.asp
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  I've never even heard of this device. It sounds like a waste of money when a Nexus 7 is just $50 more. Did it even have a substantial number of sales?
  - textminer 14y ago
    Seemed unfortunately successful in its advertising. Have a brother in first grade who is a champion at using my iPhone and iPad to play games and look up dinosaur pictures and videos. Suggested to my stepmom he get an iPad mini or Nexus 7 for Christmas, but she had already bought him a MEEP (at his request). What a shame. Kids can (and should) learn real computing devices. Giving them locked-down, "child-friendly" devices is a disservice to both them and the society they'll one day be adults in. ( - Pretty sure that learning Logo, QBasic, DOS, and Telnet/Winsock during grade school in 90's is the only reason I'm an employed programmer now.)
    - MichaelGG 14y ago
      I'm not sure what parents see in these toy-looking tablets. My daughter's had a Galaxy Tab since it came out and she was three. No problems figuring it out whatsoever.
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  It is really frustrating to see all the Android fanboys downvoting you.
  - 14y ago
radley 14y ago
85% of our users on our biggest selling app (500k+) are 4.0 & up. UPDATE: 4.0: 35%, 4.1: 31%, 4.2: 19%.
- rkudeshi 14y ago
  Paid or free app? What kind of app?
  - radley 14y ago
    Paid, widgets.
    - Steko 14y ago
      Napkin math says that ICS+ users are 8.75 times more likely to purchase than pre ICS users. Interestingly this is the sort of magnitude of difference we sometimes see between iOS and Android app stores. It would also be interesting to see the number for a fairly popular free app. That could give you an estimate on what percentage of users buys a low end Android phone as a feature phone replacement. Recap on a recent conjecture of mine: the difference in paid content from iOS to Android is primarily due to the number of credit cards Google has on file moreso than the number of people using Android as a feature phone replacement (often claimed to be the big reason for dollar disparity between the stores).
      - radley 14y ago
        We also have an old free app made on sdk 2.3 and backwards compatible to 2.1. That one is 62% 2.x users.
        Steko 14y ago
        That seems fairly close to the general population breakdown (59.2% are pre-Honeycomb and 62% wouldn't have been too long ago). Just one data point but it seems in line with credit cards being the issue not people who don't use the app store (if it was more of the latter you'd expect something like a 2:1 high end buy ratio for free apps but it looks just like the whole population).
astrodust 14y ago
Pie charts are useless enough. Pie charts with varying shades of green and nonsense names are even more useless.
- paramsingh 14y ago
  Would you mind explaining why pie charts are useless? Honest question.
  - alayne 14y ago
    Pie charts are stupid because the shapes you want to compare are rotated in space. You can't distinguish close values. It's better to use a normal bar/column chart where the comparison only occurs in one dimension (height of the bar).
  - DanBC 14y ago
    In general it's hard to know what a chunk of the pie chart means. You get a very simple glance that one chunk is bigger, and another chunk is much bigger. But looking at that chart: How big is Eclair & Older compared to Honeycomb? That chart is ordered by release; you start reading it at "3 o'clock" on the right hand side, and work clockwise. Luckily they've labled each chunk of the pie. Normally they'd just have a key alongside it. People would have to match a shade of green (or some other color) to a key to try to get the numbers. Pie charts do have uses. But they're just hard to read and present information in a weird way. (http://pol.illinoisstate.edu/jpda/charts/chart%20tips/Chartstip%202.htm http://pol.illinoisstate.edu/jpda/charts/chart%20tips/Charts...) (http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/the-problem-with-pie-charts/ http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/the-problem-with-pie-c...) (http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/ http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/)
  - astrodust 14y ago
    Two specific reasons: It's very hard to judge the relative size of various wedges, especially when they're not adjacent and one is significantly larger than the other. Secondly, the labels are usually sufficiently removed from the data that you need to look back and forth several times to decode it, if you can even be bothered. Here's a nearly useless pie chart: http://insights.chitika.com/uploads/screenshot-1.png http://insights.chitika.com/uploads/screenshot-1.png Here's a much more meaningful chart that tells a story: http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/firefox-adoption-2012-03-4f7a134-intro.png http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/firefox-adoption-20...

30 points by Pr0 14y ago

I wonder if anyone who develops for Android could shed some light on the difficulties they encounter when developing for a fragmented platform?

cryptoz 14y ago
Why not ask a web developer instead? Android is a lot less fragmented than the world wide web.
- gte910h 14y ago
  While this is true, owning and testing all the android devices is a lot harder than having a system with many web browsers on it. Also asking customers to upgrade is usually downloading new software for websites, but is buying new hardware for many android users (as there is no released update nor will there ever be for their devices)
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    > a system with many web browsers on it. Try multiple systems (multiple operating systems), with combinatorially many possibilities for the interesections of {operating system, browser type, browser version, screen size, resolution}.
    - gte910h 14y ago
      Which is exactly the same situation for android. And android is a far smaller area so tricks like just using the center third in both directions for large screens doesn't work.
      - chimeracoder 14y ago
        > Which is exactly the same situation for android. Not at all - the difference between any two Android devices is far less than the difference between any two potential viewers of a website. > And android is a far smaller area so tricks like just using the center third in both directions for large screens doesn't work. Android also has an extensive set of well-defined guidelines for layout and constructing applications - the more you rely on the core API to handle these tasks, the more portable your app will be across Android devices. That's a lot more than can be said for browser rendering in the general case.
- valgaze 14y ago
  Seems like a crucial distinction is that you can ask a user to use, upgrade, or install a different browser but not so easily ask them to get a new phone
  - rednukleus 14y ago
    Try telling that to a guy using IE on his locked down office computer.
    - valgaze 14y ago
      I'll tell him go here (lifesaver): http://www.google.com/chromeframe?quickenable=true http://www.google.com/chromeframe?quickenable=true
OriginalSyn 14y ago
Generally speaking you don't need to own and test all devices, the emulator does just fine. There are a few quirks here and there but as cryptoz alludes to I've never had more headaches than trying to support all the versions of IE and modern browsers.
krschultz 14y ago
There are pretty major differences between pre Ice Cream Sandwich and post Ice Cream Sandwich. My app is almost entirely Fragments, the Action Bar, rich notifications. All of these things didn't exist in 2.2 or 2.3. Thankfully between Google's support libraries and Action Bar Sherlock most of it can be papered over. I haven't had too much trouble with it so far.
- radley 14y ago
  We don't use fragments too much since they're so incomplete. We use ABS for everything. Do you support < 4.0?
  - myko 14y ago
    What is incomplete about Fragments? My company uses ABS for most of our apps, and support < 4.0 - most of our applications rely on Fragments heavily.
    - radley 14y ago
      Each time we go to use them we find something is missing. PreferenceFragment is a good example. Google insists we use it but it's not backwards compatible, thus requiring two separate activities. Are you using Fragments for phone/tablet/TV differences, or do you stick strictly to phones?
      - myko 14y ago
        All 3, and I agree about PreferenceFragment - it slipped my mind but it is a pain in the ass. I haven't run into many other issues(well, except Maps, though I believe this is handled with the new Maps API but I haven't worked on it yet).
radley 14y ago
Our best-selling app is a widget app so we probably have to contend with the most fragmentation: OS, screen size, device UI layer, device launchers, indie launchers, custom grid sizes, and mods. Then double that for screen orientations. OS differences, screen sizes, and layouts are handled by a lot of XML resources. Memory limitations is a big problem in older devices and OSes. Flexible layout design is also a challenge since Google & Samsung/HTC have opposing ideas of how big a widget should appear. Between Mike & I, we have 30+ devices for testing. I have the majority since I work on the UI and need to see how our widgets look for every possible layout. We don't need to buy one of every device made, we just cover new screen types (Droid DNA), platforms (Kindle Fire), and OSes (Nexus 4). We also make sure we have any standout devices (Google Nexus, Galaxy S3). We've been collecting phones & tablets since 2010, so we're pretty well covered for older devices. We don't mod or force-update our devices; we remain stock. When a major device updates, we update too. We don't support mods/ROMs since it's too difficult to solve bugs on moving targets. Most users understand Android has been changing exponentially over the past two years. The Galaxy Nexus is the tipping point. Anything made prior is simply outdated. Android 2.3 is our minimum supported OS, but we leave 2.2 open for those willing to try. Similarly, a few top developers are making new apps that are strictly 4.x & up.

reidmain 14y ago

The adoption rate of the latest version of Android may not be that high but does anyone know how MANY devices are running 4.0 or higher? I routinely tout the high adoption rate of iOS devices and how it justifies increasing the minimum iOS versions for apps because you still have a massive potential userbase. But because Android has more phones in the marketplace than iOS is it possibly now for developers to make Android 4.0 the minimum and still get a respected number of users?

chimeracoder 14y ago
> But because Android has more phones in the marketplace than iOS is it possibly now for developers to make Android 4.0 the minimum and still get a respected number of users? There's no easy answer to that question because it depends on what your target use case actually is. Remember that the goal of Android is to be a universal platform for hardware, which means that the target devices for Android are much more heterogeneous than iOS - and therefore the intended use case as well. I use an out-of-date Android device as a portable music player and an up-to-date one as my regular phone. Even that's not that wildly different if you start imagining people running Android on their household appliances. So, in my case, even though I technically still run Gingerbread, I'm fine with Android applications requiring 4.2+, since the only device that runs Gingerbread is essentially a single-purpose dedicated device. I imagine we'll start to see more of this behavior in the future.
- reidmain 14y ago
  "I imagine we'll start to see more of this behavior in the future." I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. Do you mean consumers will use/buy older Android devices for very specific tasks? I think the exact opposite of this will happen. Your average consumer is not going to want to have multiple devices. They just want to carry their phone around and have it do everything for them.
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    > Your average consumer is not going to want to have multiple devices. Your "average consumer" already does. The point is that Android in three years will be serving an even wider range of devices and household appliances.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jasonkostempski 14y ago

Those numbers must include the Meep! devices kids got for Christmas (Android 4.0). I don't know how many units they sold but I suspect just about all of those have been or will be returned [1]. Just about the only thing I could do on it was connect to Google Play. [1] Here's their 'Hot News' page full of apologies http://www.meeptablet.com/us/hotnews.asp http://www.meeptablet.com/us/hotnews.asp

w1ntermute 14y ago
I've never even heard of this device. It sounds like a waste of money when a Nexus 7 is just $50 more. Did it even have a substantial number of sales?
- textminer 14y ago
  Seemed unfortunately successful in its advertising. Have a brother in first grade who is a champion at using my iPhone and iPad to play games and look up dinosaur pictures and videos. Suggested to my stepmom he get an iPad mini or Nexus 7 for Christmas, but she had already bought him a MEEP (at his request). What a shame. Kids can (and should) learn real computing devices. Giving them locked-down, "child-friendly" devices is a disservice to both them and the society they'll one day be adults in. ( - Pretty sure that learning Logo, QBasic, DOS, and Telnet/Winsock during grade school in 90's is the only reason I'm an employed programmer now.)
  - MichaelGG 14y ago
    I'm not sure what parents see in these toy-looking tablets. My daughter's had a Galaxy Tab since it came out and she was three. No problems figuring it out whatsoever.
enraged_camel 14y ago
It is really frustrating to see all the Android fanboys downvoting you.
- 14y ago

radley 14y ago

85% of our users on our biggest selling app (500k+) are 4.0 & up. UPDATE: 4.0: 35%, 4.1: 31%, 4.2: 19%.

rkudeshi 14y ago
Paid or free app? What kind of app?
- radley 14y ago
  Paid, widgets.
  - Steko 14y ago
    Napkin math says that ICS+ users are 8.75 times more likely to purchase than pre ICS users. Interestingly this is the sort of magnitude of difference we sometimes see between iOS and Android app stores. It would also be interesting to see the number for a fairly popular free app. That could give you an estimate on what percentage of users buys a low end Android phone as a feature phone replacement. Recap on a recent conjecture of mine: the difference in paid content from iOS to Android is primarily due to the number of credit cards Google has on file moreso than the number of people using Android as a feature phone replacement (often claimed to be the big reason for dollar disparity between the stores).
    - radley 14y ago
      We also have an old free app made on sdk 2.3 and backwards compatible to 2.1. That one is 62% 2.x users.
      - Steko 14y ago
        That seems fairly close to the general population breakdown (59.2% are pre-Honeycomb and 62% wouldn't have been too long ago). Just one data point but it seems in line with credit cards being the issue not people who don't use the app store (if it was more of the latter you'd expect something like a 2:1 high end buy ratio for free apps but it looks just like the whole population).

astrodust 14y ago

Pie charts are useless enough. Pie charts with varying shades of green and nonsense names are even more useless.

paramsingh 14y ago
Would you mind explaining why pie charts are useless? Honest question.
- alayne 14y ago
  Pie charts are stupid because the shapes you want to compare are rotated in space. You can't distinguish close values. It's better to use a normal bar/column chart where the comparison only occurs in one dimension (height of the bar).
- DanBC 14y ago
  In general it's hard to know what a chunk of the pie chart means. You get a very simple glance that one chunk is bigger, and another chunk is much bigger. But looking at that chart: How big is Eclair & Older compared to Honeycomb? That chart is ordered by release; you start reading it at "3 o'clock" on the right hand side, and work clockwise. Luckily they've labled each chunk of the pie. Normally they'd just have a key alongside it. People would have to match a shade of green (or some other color) to a key to try to get the numbers. Pie charts do have uses. But they're just hard to read and present information in a weird way. (http://pol.illinoisstate.edu/jpda/charts/chart%20tips/Chartstip%202.htm http://pol.illinoisstate.edu/jpda/charts/chart%20tips/Charts...) (http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/the-problem-with-pie-charts/ http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/the-problem-with-pie-c...) (http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/ http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/)
- astrodust 14y ago
  Two specific reasons: It's very hard to judge the relative size of various wedges, especially when they're not adjacent and one is significantly larger than the other. Secondly, the labels are usually sufficiently removed from the data that you need to look back and forth several times to decode it, if you can even be bothered. Here's a nearly useless pie chart: http://insights.chitika.com/uploads/screenshot-1.png http://insights.chitika.com/uploads/screenshot-1.png Here's a much more meaningful chart that tells a story: http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/firefox-adoption-2012-03-4f7a134-intro.png http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/firefox-adoption-20...