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> Anyone complaining about Android fragmentation should ask themselves if they would prefer if every device would go the "Apple way" and make their very own ope
by weland 13y ago
> Anyone complaining about Android fragmentation should ask themselves if they would prefer if every device would go the "Apple way" and make their very own operating systems for their device. Would this really solve fragmentation?
I, for instance, would prefer that the industry adopt six or eight standard screen sizes and stick the fuck with them. Google is in a position where it can mandate that, actually.
There are many excuses one can make in Google's favour, but this does not take away the fact that their development environment is very poor, primarily due to fragmentation (and then there's development tools and documentation, but those have been traditionally been a stumbling point).
Also, it's intelectually rude to try to rest your arguments on words for which you construct your own meaning. That's what salespeople do and it's a marginal improvement (in technique, not in correctness) of the straw man sophism.
> "operating system" is a very generic expression. For most people today an operating system is the software that is installed on the device minus applications that the user installed himself.
"Operating system" is a very clear expression that means exactly one thing.
Fragmentation can mean more things, and this article claims one of them. People who want to write software for the iOS operating system have a small set of screen sizes and resolutions to target. People who want to write software for the Android operating system have a fuckload of incompatible APIs, screen sizes and resolutions to target, which is exactly what fragmentation means. This is especially problematic for small apps: if you need 3 weeks to write the core of your application, and 1 day to tweak each combination of obscure resolution and screen size, strange device, hardware configuration range and API version you can easily end up doubling your development time.
Also, if you actually try your hand at writing an application with a decent UI, you'll find that the "a little" you want to tweak it is "a lot". In my experience, if you try to target a full set of platforms, ranging from small phones to full HD tablets, you actually end up designing 3 UIs from scratch (unless you want at least two of them to feel like someone stretched or compressed the other one to fit a screen it wasn't designed to). This includes entire sections of the UI logic (e.g. redesigning navigation flow), and while there are tools to help you with it (such as Fragments), it doesn't take away the pain.
- bane 13y ago> "Operating system" is a very clear expression that means exactly one thing. That's not correct at all. An "Operating System" can mean many things and there's tremendous debate in the OS and Systems community over the definition.
- katbyte 13y agoThis is the first i've ever heard of a debate, wiki seems pretty clear about what an OS is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system
- bane 13y agoSome questions to consider: Is it an OS's job to... -provide a Graphical Interface? -provide any interface? -handle a hardware abstraction layer? -handle font rendering? -composite graphical displays? -provide an abstract virtual machine environment across different processor types? -handle user accounts? What about systems that aren't multi-user? -does an OS need to handle virtual memory to be an OS? what if all memory management (virtual or otherwise) is handled by a dedicated support chip instead? Some more: -does the simple timing code on a $1 digital watch count as an OS? -does a system that, when turned on, goes automatically to a memory address for more instructions, and those instructions are only the instructions for a user program count as having an OS (lots and lots of computers past and present are like this)? -does an OS provide software beyond just the Kernel? e.g. Start with a modern linux distro and start removing packages, at what point is it no longer an OS? (GNU would like you to think it's an OS only when you have GNU userspace tools, X etc. on it. ) -is an OS just a space to host and run programs? Does that make the JVM an OS? How about a browser? How about MS-Excel and Macros? -the OS I'm using right now ships with a paint program, a calculator a browser and a text editor, must an OS have those things? -how about a system with a complex BIOS that happens to have USB, Ethernet support and a web browser? Is the boot code now an OS? When does bootcode become an OS if this isn't it? -should an OS handle all available hardware on a system or just some subset? -what is the first OS in history? etc. etc. etc. At some point, somewhere between boot loader and a fully loaded gaming system there exists this thing called an OS. It seems to be more than just a kernel, unless it's an embedded system with basically just a kernel (unless the system is so small and dedicated it just runs code directly without an OS layer (unless you count the code that's running and doing its own resource management an OS since by definition an OS does resource management)), or it seems to be resource management code that also happens to have nice font rendering and a full networking stack. The debate goes much deeper and has gone on for decades.
- inthewind 13y ago> I, for instance, would prefer that the industry adopt six or eight standard screen sizes and stick the fuck with them. Google is in a position where it can mandate that, actually. I'd rather think of devices having different size displays, different shape displays, multiple displays or even no display. Theses things can change rather rapidly! I quite like the idea of skinning incrementally, start with a CLI (or even something more minimal - like the button and beep input/output interface) and go up from there.