Just seemed like a lot of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt from one random blogger without any facts, figures, or data. I don't really know why this is being upvoted.
Hah. This is ridiculous. "Android is closed!" they scream. "Android is fragmented!" they continue to yell. The same arguments, year after year after year. And guess what? The popular open source operating system keeps getting better, keeps gaining users, keeps continuing to show up on new devices. Android as we know it isn't going to disappear. Anyone suggesting it is just isn't with it.
I feel the reality is that Android is open when you look at gerrit, Cyanogenmod, and the Apache license.
The closed view is the inability to view the source of what is on the devices that people buy, view the in-process development work by the major contributors, and the bootloaders on all of the popular devices.
Android as a side-by-side simple competitor to the iPhone is dead because it is so much bigger now than what can fit on a single Cupertino conference table, and that's awesome.
One thing I don't understand about all this talk of fragmentation: why does it matter? Should I care that some phones have three buttons and some have four? Should I care that screen resolutions vary? Should I care that the kindle fire doesn't have the stock android homescreen? What do any of these things matter? When I download an app, it works perfectly fine no matter what the platform specifics are. It's all android-compatible.
"No options for lower Res screen, so this app isn't an option for me."
"Has potential, but doesn't resize for smaller screens, so can't see half of what's going on. Interface is snappy though, which is good."
"screen resolution issues: Doesn't display properly on my Samsung Galaxy Ace. Hope you can fix this. Otherwise, quite an interesting app."
"My phone screen is too small for this app"
Along with a slew of other problems with bugginess, lack of feature parity with iOS, etc. Telling is the variance of its score (http://cl.ly/0m3b2a2v3s1Y0x071Q0e) versus iOS (http://cl.ly/030I0M3z1I181g3T2p2T), suggesting that the Path developers have this product working well on some phones, but terribly on others. That's one of the clearest examples of fragmentation that I can find.
Screen resolution bugs are no less a problem on iOS. My toddler routinely yells at 480x320 games that look like cap on the iPad. I'm honestly a little surprised that you picked this particular issue to pick on. If anything, my experience is that Android apps are more likely to work across aspect ratios than iOS apps are.
It's more difficult to code for lots of combinations of keyboards, screen sizes and ratios as well as with cpu/gpu/memory constraints, and API/OS versions in mind for developers.
With that in mind, the final product will get a lower quality if the developer can't afford the costs of optimizing for every device. Or your device incapable of running the app at all.
It's really not that hard, actually. Developers typically don't need to worry about different keyboards at all. CPU/GPU/Memory/screen constraints? It's a lot easier to do this for Android than it is for the Web. Or for any desktop application.
> Or your device incapable of running the app at all.
If your device isn't capable of running the app, it won't install (or even appear in the Market for that matter!) assuming the developers aren't entirely incompetent.
If I buy an Android Device (tm) and get something that has a (both in terms of visuals and functionality) botched and outdated version of the Android project, I care.
If that software will be forever behind the platform and _not_ as you state it 'work perfectly fine', I care again.
For me this was a very real scenario with the HTC Hero (no idea what the name outside of the EU was). I preordered the phone, got a brick with an old version of Android with a non-standard ui and while the world moved on I saw more and more applications on the market that didn't like to support my 1.5/1.6 device at that time.
I claim it's better now, but mostly because Google took a lot of time between the last handset release and now ICS. Phones could catch up to 2.x, crawling sloooowly from update to update, while Google didn't release 3.0 and worked on ICS for a while. I'm pretty sure we'll see a great gap in adoption again very soon: The manufacturer are going to drop support for ~most~ handsets or take month to create an update for existing devices.
The main problems I see with this is (apart from people like me that feel left behind/screwed if you sell them a device that is more or less DOA) that the "brand" loses a lot of value. If you compare a shiny "Android phone" with another "Android phone" and one looks gorgeous and runs fast while the other looks wildly different and is slow as molasses you're alienating the customer. You force your customers to do a lot of "search the reviews" dances before buying a mobile or they end up with a POS that is never going to do what you see on "other Android phones" around you.
It matters A LOT if you develop apps. Getting things to work consistently on different processors, screen dimensions, buttons, etc, takes a lot of effort.
It was JavaME's greatest nightmare (one could never be sure an app would work at all on different devices). Luckily, since there's no JCP and vendor-specific packages, at least that part of the fragmentation was solved...
Reminder: pretty much all of these arguments could have been leveled at Windows in the early '90s, leading Microsoft to create WHQL.
Also, the Motorola acquisition could help or could harm Google tremendously depending on how they handle it. Clearly, if they try to undercut competitors and release Motorola-only features, it'll murder Android. But if they use Motorola to defend Android, to break the carriers' veto on technology and to drive best-of-breed designs, competitors may not be too concerned. Hopefully, this is the route Google goes: use Motorola to cement Android's place in mobile, then spin Motorola back out in an IPO.
Is fragmentation such a problem? Seems inevitable to me.
Different people have different requirements so the hardware and UI design are going to be somewhat different between devices.
We've been dealing with this for years already just now with the internet everywhere we have the advantage of being able to offload some things to our own servers rather than the user's device.
In fact I'd go so far as to say more fragmentation of android might be a good thing in some cases and be preferable to the fragmentation we already have over having entirely different systems for different form factors of computers.
I run Linux on my desktop PC with an x86 processor, but why couldn't my desktop PC be an android system with an ARM processor? The kernel is largely the same as what I already have and I would have a much bigger cross section of apps available for both my smartphone and my PC.
All I would need is an android interface that is more suited to desktop use, for example some form of taskbar and overlapping or tiled windows.
"3. Amazon shipping a wildly successful, yet unidentifiable, version of an old Android build over the holiday... and making it a wild success."
The Kindle Fire runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), as does nearly every Android phone being sold today (notable exceptions being the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus).
Author is right only about one thing..despite absence of any facts or fact checking..
if you read( you know that habit informed people do) you would notice some particular wording at the OHA site describing android..
It is described as the first OHA project with an implied not the last project of OHA. Yes Android will go away to be replaced by the 2nd OHA project..but not anytime soon.
15 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 50.1 ms ] threadThe closed view is the inability to view the source of what is on the devices that people buy, view the in-process development work by the major contributors, and the bootloaders on all of the popular devices.
Android as a side-by-side simple competitor to the iPhone is dead because it is so much bigger now than what can fit on a single Cupertino conference table, and that's awesome.
"No options for lower Res screen, so this app isn't an option for me."
"Has potential, but doesn't resize for smaller screens, so can't see half of what's going on. Interface is snappy though, which is good."
"screen resolution issues: Doesn't display properly on my Samsung Galaxy Ace. Hope you can fix this. Otherwise, quite an interesting app."
"My phone screen is too small for this app"
Along with a slew of other problems with bugginess, lack of feature parity with iOS, etc. Telling is the variance of its score (http://cl.ly/0m3b2a2v3s1Y0x071Q0e) versus iOS (http://cl.ly/030I0M3z1I181g3T2p2T), suggesting that the Path developers have this product working well on some phones, but terribly on others. That's one of the clearest examples of fragmentation that I can find.
[1] https://market.android.com/details?id=com.path&hl=en
With that in mind, the final product will get a lower quality if the developer can't afford the costs of optimizing for every device. Or your device incapable of running the app at all.
> Or your device incapable of running the app at all.
If your device isn't capable of running the app, it won't install (or even appear in the Market for that matter!) assuming the developers aren't entirely incompetent.
Credentials: I'm an Android developer.
If I buy an Android Device (tm) and get something that has a (both in terms of visuals and functionality) botched and outdated version of the Android project, I care.
If that software will be forever behind the platform and _not_ as you state it 'work perfectly fine', I care again.
For me this was a very real scenario with the HTC Hero (no idea what the name outside of the EU was). I preordered the phone, got a brick with an old version of Android with a non-standard ui and while the world moved on I saw more and more applications on the market that didn't like to support my 1.5/1.6 device at that time.
I claim it's better now, but mostly because Google took a lot of time between the last handset release and now ICS. Phones could catch up to 2.x, crawling sloooowly from update to update, while Google didn't release 3.0 and worked on ICS for a while. I'm pretty sure we'll see a great gap in adoption again very soon: The manufacturer are going to drop support for ~most~ handsets or take month to create an update for existing devices.
The main problems I see with this is (apart from people like me that feel left behind/screwed if you sell them a device that is more or less DOA) that the "brand" loses a lot of value. If you compare a shiny "Android phone" with another "Android phone" and one looks gorgeous and runs fast while the other looks wildly different and is slow as molasses you're alienating the customer. You force your customers to do a lot of "search the reviews" dances before buying a mobile or they end up with a POS that is never going to do what you see on "other Android phones" around you.
It was JavaME's greatest nightmare (one could never be sure an app would work at all on different devices). Luckily, since there's no JCP and vendor-specific packages, at least that part of the fragmentation was solved...
Also, the Motorola acquisition could help or could harm Google tremendously depending on how they handle it. Clearly, if they try to undercut competitors and release Motorola-only features, it'll murder Android. But if they use Motorola to defend Android, to break the carriers' veto on technology and to drive best-of-breed designs, competitors may not be too concerned. Hopefully, this is the route Google goes: use Motorola to cement Android's place in mobile, then spin Motorola back out in an IPO.
We've been dealing with this for years already just now with the internet everywhere we have the advantage of being able to offload some things to our own servers rather than the user's device.
In fact I'd go so far as to say more fragmentation of android might be a good thing in some cases and be preferable to the fragmentation we already have over having entirely different systems for different form factors of computers.
I run Linux on my desktop PC with an x86 processor, but why couldn't my desktop PC be an android system with an ARM processor? The kernel is largely the same as what I already have and I would have a much bigger cross section of apps available for both my smartphone and my PC.
All I would need is an android interface that is more suited to desktop use, for example some form of taskbar and overlapping or tiled windows.
The Kindle Fire runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), as does nearly every Android phone being sold today (notable exceptions being the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus).
This page is somewhat useful for the Fire: https://developer.amazon.com/help/faq.html#KindleFire
if you read( you know that habit informed people do) you would notice some particular wording at the OHA site describing android..
It is described as the first OHA project with an implied not the last project of OHA. Yes Android will go away to be replaced by the 2nd OHA project..but not anytime soon.