Fragmentation vs. Obsolescence In the Android Ecosphere 315
Posted
by
timothy
from the can't-do-what-you-can't-do dept.
from the can't-do-what-you-can't-do dept.
whisper_jeff writes "Engadget has an interesting article up discussing whether or not Android is fragmenting. While the article discusses the concept that it may be more about handsets becoming obsolete at a dramatic pace rather than the OS fragmenting, it also begins by noting that there are currently five different versions of Android on the market, which implies there is a notable degree of fragmentation. Regardless of it being fragmentation or handsets becoming obsolete to new feature sets in a terribly short period of time, I believe this development cycle could turn casual consumers away and hurt Android's chances for long-term mainstream success."
Re:Scared iPhone developer (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, you can build with a modern SDK while having a minSDK attribute set to 3 (android 1.5) so your app will be compatible with android >=1.5 (99.9% android phones are 1.5 or newer), and on 1.5 you can have access to so many things, it will be difficult to really have a need of doing something which is not possible.
Live wallpapers and maybe some advanced graphic functions will not be available, and the hardware of those "legacy" devices won't be able to handle that, anyways.
So there are only a few things left which are not possible, like account manager integration, the cool Log.wtf() function and a few more, but nothing extremely important, I'd say...
Re:It's Early In Android's Market Life (Score:5, Interesting)
These "growing pains" need to be worked out, but app developers will quickly learn to check versions at runtime to make sure most of their features will work in older (or newer) versions of Android. Apple took care very well from the start, but they've had lots of consumer software experience. Goole & Android will get their act together ... it will just take a little time.
I thought Apple's approach was to strictly control both the hardware platform and the developer's tools, both to ensure they will work together and also to make it highly inconvenient for developers to port their apps to other platforms like Android. That sounds like marketing and vendor lock-in experience. The term "software experience" seems to suggest that they have tackled the complexity involved with developing for diverse systems instead of avoiding it.
Re:Scared iPhone developer (Score:5, Interesting)
Dont be.
Fragmentation is mainly FUD. Android applications operate via the Dalvik virtual machine meaning the vast majority of applications will happily run on almost all hardware. Only when you start writing applications that require access to a version specific API does this become a problem, most of Android's API's are version agnostic. The simpler your application the fewer issues you will have with it, the so called "issue" of fragmentation is only true for the most complex of applications, if you are writing a simple XML parser then you wont have a problem.
Re:Just give us our devices rooted (Score:2, Interesting)
Control. If they give up that, they might not be able to force you on to their services.
Motorola's the worst, since they sign the bootloader, kernel, and file system. The devices won't boot if any part of that has changed, and the only device you -can- change is the DROID (though the Milestone variant is locked down, last I checked.)
Re:Consumers don't care. Developers get a bum deal (Score:5, Interesting)
The only people to be hurt by the 'fragmentation/obsolescence' issue is developers. I don't want to downplay the developer issue, but as far as consumers are concerned , most of the big-time apps have no trouble supporting multiple iterations of the platform.
On the contrary, please do downplay the developer issue. Obviously, it matters a great deal to us as developers, but the purpose of hardware and software -- at least in the commercial market -- isn't to please developers, it's to please customers so they'll give money to the companies that employ the developers. If enough customers want a device that requires the developers to read documentation in cuneiform and write code in assembly language, then we'll be reading documentation in cuneiform and writing code in assembly language, or the software companies will find someone who will.
Don't get me wrong; *I* care about these issues as much as the next developer. But nobody but us cares about these issues or what we think about them. For the vast majority of us who don't work at mythical miracle companies that actually give a wet crap what their programming staff thinks, we'll end up coding for whatever platform the bean counters and bizdev monkeys decide is going to sell. And if they're wrong -- a decision that's ultimately going to be made by consumers with even less technical knowledge than the bean counters -- then we'll end up working on something else, possibly at another company if the last one didn't have enough capital reserves to withstand a product failure.
That being the case, the author of TFA is either out of touch with the reality of the industry or, as several posters have suggested, this is just astroturf FUD designed to scare consumers away by using long, scary words -- like fragmentation, for example -- whose meaning they don't know, just as most of them probably have no idea what an operating system is or that Android is an OS. I'd be willing to wager a decent chunk of change that most non-technical customers would read the headline and the first couple of sentences of TFA -- they're certainly not going to read the whole thing -- and conclude that the gist of the article is that Android phones are more likely to physically break into little bits than iPhones.
They say the same thing about Symbian/J2ME (Score:3, Interesting)
This is going on for years on Symbian scene and J2ME (Java Micro), same thing being said over and over and unfortunately some developers seem to actually believe it.
I will give one single title: Opera. Opera Mobile runs on ANY Symbian S60 and Opera Mini runs on ANY J2ME client. There is no "Opera Mobile for Nokia E71", the drop down menus on some download may confuse you. It is just, some developers, especially the ones directly selling (no trial) apps want to make sure the application will run instead of living hassle to give money back or bad feedback. Another thing is, root certs which devices have. Some have Verisign, some hove Thawte or both. They want to make sure (especially with J2ME) that application won't be treated as "unsigned", especially network aware apps.
Of course, if you see something like "S60 V3 FP2", it may confuse you. It just says "Devices with compass built in", much like iPhone 3G vs 3GS and I don't see anyone talking about fragmentation on iPhone scene.
So J2ME is really "write once,run anywhere" and Symbian is really device independent. Of course, the Developer makes the difference.
Re:This is Apple's most successful FUD astroturf (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple = red herring.
Even worse, there's a huge elephant in the room. The crux of TFA is that fragmentation is the price paid for "the pace of innovation." But the problem is not new releases -- it's the failure of Google's Android Market (app store) to keep up with the needs of the marketplace. This has caused a bunch of carriers, hardware makers, and iTunes-wannabes to create their own app stores [slashdot.org] -- each with their own requirements and generally making life hell for developers. The reason is that Google's own Android Market was slow to launch internationally (especially to support paid apps), has an infamously poor UX, and -- shocking for a company called Google -- poor search capability.
New hardware and OS releases are generally welcomed by developers. But if you're an Android developer, what's insane is having to support multiple app stores for the SAME hardware and SAME OS -- just because Google didn't bother to support paid apps in Canada until two months ago, for example. And don't even get me started on the joys of trying to make an app for China [slashdot.org].
Hey Andy, before you pass off fragmentation as a necessary part of innovation, take a stroll down to the department responsible for creating Android Market and tell them to start innovating to rein in the chaos they've created.
Re:Scared iPhone developer (Score:3, Interesting)
There's hardware heterogeneity issues also, though: some phones have multitouch and some don't, for example, and the processor speeds and screen sizes are different. Even for devices with the same sensors, the sensors can behave differently, e.g. what kind of control over the camera you have and what data it feeds you, and what the accelerometer's characteristics are.
Doesn't matter for a decent number of apps, but matters for, say, mobile games.
This is mistaken, actually. They all have hardware multitouch, some don't have software multitouch enabled for legal reasons. But as people upgrade to newer versions of the OS, the multitouch magically appears! Also, as the virtual machine has got considerably faster, my original G1 is now much more performant than it was when new, and thanks to the nice folk at Cyanogen it already runs Eclair and will soon run FroYo. Yes, there probably are differences in the actual physical characteristics of things like accelerometers, but the operating system abstracts this out for you so your program can simply ignore it.
If you write your app for the version of the O/S you want to target, and specify anything unusual in the manifest, it will run on the handsets; and that's all.
Re:Android 2.2 helping with this? (Score:2, Interesting)
I won't be buying an Android phone until they let me myself upgrade the OS with the latest or a modified version at my will.