“When Android was announced, I wrote that if ‘Google can deliver, the impact could be huge,’ but I caveated a major issue: Google would need to prevent the market from fragmenting and allow it to succeed where other mobile and desktop Linux implementations had failed,” Michael Gartenberg writes for Engadget. “Linux fragmentation remains one of the many reasons the open-source OS has failed to capture a meaningful share of the PC desktop market, and Android is rapidly following a similar path by fragmenting into different versions with different core feature sets, different users experiences and run different applications.”
Gartenberg writes, “I recently tried to install one of the few good Android games and found it won’t work on Nexus One as it has a nonstandard screen resolution. This isn’t just about older devices either — many new devices were announced at Mobile World Congress running either Android 1.5 or 1.6. When does it end? Either Google addresses the fragmentation issue immediately or it will find that Android suffers the same fate as Linux on the desktop.”
Read the full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Andrew W.” for the heads up.]
Fragmentation exists at some level on all mobile phones and computers. Even iPhone:
http://metrics.admob.com/2009/12/updated-iphone-os-stats/
As a PC developer for the last 12 years, this is nothing new, everyone has a different screen size, CPU speed and amount of RAM. This article talks about Android fragmentation as if the internals are flat out binary incompatible with applications for each phone, not true. How is Android fragmentation any different than iMac fragmentation? Do newer iMacs have larger screens? Do they have higher CPU power? Do they have more memory? Do they have different types of hardware? Has Apple needed to release updates occasionally to resolve software issues on the newer hardware? Yes on all accounts.
Linux fragmentation is completely different. Linux fragmentation is like a hundred people making different types of cookies, they are all cookies in the end but with different flavors. Android fragmentation is everyone making chocolate chip cookies out of the same dough with a different number of chips in each cookie.
Just because a handful of Android developers can’t get their code right the first time doesn’t mean the platform is going to fail. All the fragmentation problems on Android can be resolved by the developer and frankly it is not very difficult.
As a developer for iPhone and Android, I would rather build my business on an app store model that I can count on. If you aren’t an iPhone developer that has had an app yanked, then you don’t know what it’s like to spend hundreds of hours writing an app, getting it approved and then having Apple come back later and yank it for arbitrary reasons. It’s like making your approach to the aircraft carrier, being cleared to land and then getting your jet bulldozed off the carrier while you are sleeping. Am I doing business with my fickle high-school girlfriend? Not anymore.
This is my livelihood and it doesn’t inspire me to waste hundreds more hours if I can’t even bring a product to market. People like myself, in bulk, made the iPhone app store what it is today. But if we are going to be treated like 3rd class citizens, we’ll take our apps elsewhere. Right now, the best ‘elsewhere’ is Android.