Android fragmentation: A blessing and a curse

[sincity]

Android is certainly a very fragmented mobile operating system, but is this an entirely bad thing? British network-testing firm OpenSignal has posted a new chart showing that Google's mobile platform is more fragmented than it's ever been as it's being used on nearly 12,000 distinct devices, or roughly triple the 4,000 distinct devices it appeared on last year. While this certainly has nightmarish implications for long-suffering app developers, OpenSignal says that fragmentation has actually been one of the reasons for Android's success.

 

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[rolf]

It's always interesting to see this.

 

Android's fragmentation is exactly the same as the Windows fragmentation of ~15 years ago. Problematic since everything needs to be supported, awesome since everyone can run it.

 

The main problem is that the end-users don't always know which hardware they have running, while on Windows the "Intel Pentium 3 Inside" showed at least something. Whether such application can run is only the question after you've bought it (don't play the illegal apk game...).

 

The fragmentation comes hard on Android. iOS (as mentioned) will get fragmentation too, where I expect Apple to correct it by stating that the "speed" of the 5SBudget is similar to the 4. But only two versions is still acceptable and hence easily maintainable in the appstore. For Windows Phone, they only require different amounts of memory for certain applications (yet); so that is also still maintainable.

 

The fragmentation won't kill Android, but it will get people angry sometimes.