Accidental Technologist

Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

  • Home
  • About
  • Still River Software
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Genesis

You are here: Home / Technology / Android Fragmentation is Disturbing

Android Fragmentation is Disturbing

October 14, 2010 by Rob Bazinet 2 Comments

Tweet

A recent blog post over on the TweetDeck blog shows just how fragmented the Android phone market is already, and we have just begun.

As we bring our initial Android TweetDeck beta period to a close, we wanted to quickly reflect on the Android ecosystem and what might be considered extreme fragmentation. To date we’ve had 36,427 active beta testers and below you can see the massive variety of phones and Android OS versions everyone is running. We were really shocked to see the number of custom roms, crazy phones and general level of customization/hackalicious nature of Android. From our perspective it’s pretty cool to have our app work on such a wide variety of devices and Android OS variations.

Taken from their post, you can see how many different devices they saw in their beta.  This is different devices with many potentially versions of Android.  By my precise calculations, that?s 244 different phones and 108 different versions of the operation system and ROMs.  This is pretty staggering and quite a task to try to support.

Google says this is not an issue, but I wonder.  As a software developer and have heard Android developers explaining their issues with supporting different versions of the Android operating system, I think there is more than meets the eye and more issues to come.  An article from ZDNet this summer supports my thoughts:

But is this a problem? Well, I think that six major releases in the space of 19 months has been a problem. That pace of change speaks of Android?s geeky origins. For Joe Average, this created an ultra-confusing marketplace where operating system versions changed every few months. It also meant that compatibility issues were inevitable.

I will personally not pursue developing for Android because of fragmentation alone.  Stepping into a market which has so many different devices and operating system versions wreaks of support nightmares for developers.  The sad part is, I don?t have a solution to the problem.  Apple get chastised for its closeness, but controller the hardware and the operating system seems to work well.

There is even a web site dedicated to the problem, AndroidFragmentation.com.

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • More
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Pocket
  • Reddit

Related

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: Android

Care about your privacy? I do and use Fathom Analytics on this site.

Fathom Analytics

Recent Posts

  • How to Fix Rails Flash Rendering When Using Hotwire
  • Hotwire Fix for CORS Error when using Omniauth
  • Fix Installation of Ruby using rbenv on macOS Big Sur
  • RailsConf 2021 and the Future of Conferences
  • Fixing Out of Diskspace Errors on Amazon EC2

Categories

Services I Love

HatchBox - Easy Rails Deploys Fathom Analytics
Follow @rbazinet

Rob Bazinet (ruby.social/@rbazinet)
@rbazinet

  • Working to wrap up my current consulting gig by mid-April. I will be looking for the next thing soon. If anyone has… https://t.co/sg3cSV9yqM
    about 12 hours ago
  • I’ve been spending some time using Notion AI lately and it surprisingly good. Since all the rage lately is ChatGPT,… https://t.co/cUXFWIRCVV
    about 3 days ago
  • I think these steps are true for any target audience. https://t.co/0ht6rIzOW3
    about 3 days ago
  • I’ve been enjoying a show from the Magnolia network called The Craftsman. It’s mainly about woodworking but his phi… https://t.co/sWTUBbSsl6
    about 4 days ago
  • I found the resource I was looking for last night that is similar to https://t.co/Pyn0IIjRdP, it is… https://t.co/U7TMe77FMF
    about 4 days ago
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments
Find me on Mastodon