Tag: fragmentation

Erosion in Interest to Develop for Android due to Growing Fragmentation

The Register published the following news on their website a few days ago:

A new study conducted by IDC and mobile-developer platform and services company Appcelerator has determined that as Google’s open source Android operating system becomes more and more fragmented, fewer and fewer developers are putting it on their “must-code-for” list.

When this subject comes up, I always point to these statistics, published by Tweetdeck in October 2010:
http://tweetdeck.posterous.com/android-ecosystem

If the Android ecosystem was that fragmented already 18 months ago, consider how fragmented it is nowadays now that we have Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) and 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) added to the equation.

Oh, and don’t forget about tablet support that was added to Android 3.0, which makes the number of screen sizes and types of hardware even more diverse than it was 18 months ago.

Link : The Register – Fragmentation bomb wounds Android in developer war

Android Ecosystem Statistics Overload

Impressive stats showing a huge number of Android phone types and OS versions used by Tweetdeck beta testers.

Link : Tweetdeck – Android Ecosystem Infoporn Overload

Update October 10th, 2011: Sadly the enormous amount of comments that could be found below the original post are lost in cyberspace after Tweetdeck moved their blog to Posterous. In the comments there was a very interesting debate going on between Android developers, lovers, haters, neutral observers and more, discussing the fragmentation of the Android platform. Some people did not see it as a problem, but others did. An interesting discussion that is unfortunately now lost forever…  🙁

A couple of the comments that I found interesting are still somewhere in the archives of my Gmail. Maybe I will put a couple of those comments in a new blog post so the discussion can continue. I would be interested in the opinions of people at this moment in time, nearly a year after Tweetdeck’s post.