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Will Android Flavors Spoil the Platform?
rsmiller510 writes "Open source operating systems have a lot of upsides, but when you give cell phone makers and providers the power to customize the phones to whatever degree they like, it could end up confusing consumers and watering down the Android label."
The problem is not the fact that there's choice, but that there are distributions that lock you in and give you no choice (which is most of them). The Android distributions available, currently, are not very good and are actually very poor representations of Android as a platform. If we had a choice of device as well as a choice of Android distribution without the lock-in, then it would be a Good Thing.
Right now there are a few Motorola devices that are still on 1.6, and the expected release for 2.x keeps sliding and sliding.
Many of Motorola's phones are marketed as "1.6, upgradeable to 2.x", but in truth there seem to be hardware issues that make this complicated, and it remains to be seen if 2.x will ever actually be distributed to owners of the lower selling phones.
We've already seen Motorola cancel the upgrade for non-US phones of the same models, to "ensure the best user experience".
Point being, advertised capability is not necessarily capability.
The issues on the iPhone you linked to are for a model that is over two years old. I had a 3G until two weeks ago, with iOS 4 it could get slow at times launching certain apps but it wasn't a big enough issue to warrant reverting back to iOS 3.x and it's not a big enough issue that my fiancee complains about it.
It's not like there are any iPhone 3Gs sitting on shelves across the planet with the slow ass iOS 4 while a iPhone 4 is sitting next to it for sale. The fragmentation chart you linked to comparing iOS to Android is flawed in that the 3.x flavor fragmentation isn't because of Apple, its because users just don't update their phones. The Android fragmentation is the fault of the vendors, so apples and oranges for that argument.
So really its 44.54 iOS 3.x, 34.05 iOS 4.x and 21.42 running jailbroken or iOS 2.x and are never going to patch anyway or get apps anyway so who cares? At least in early August
The Android issue being discussed here is fragmentation of current phone models. Apple is shipping iOS 3.x for iPads and iOS 4.x for iPhones and iPods, so mobile wise Apple is shipping one flavor of the iOS, 4.x
As a developer for both Android and iOS (and a few other mobile) platforms, I can say this is already an issue with Android (from a dev's perspective, at least). While "choice" always sounds good for consumers, the only real choices are usually pre-made by carriers and handset manufacturers, leaving the consumer with little more choice than they had with previous generations of phones (Motorola's RAZR had a pretty good Wheel of Fortune game "app," too).
Although the Android emulator is fine for quick checks, a viable Android product must be tested on a growing number of handsets and other products, making R&D for a new app MUCH more time consuming and costly than that of its iPhone counterpart (Even if you only wanted to support a single device, choosing to support only the latest iPhone 4, for instance, still gives one a much larger target audience than choosing only to support the latest Samsung Galaxy model on a particular carrier).
And supporting a commercial Android app is a larger undertaking too -- more like that of traditional PC development, in which one might expect to deal with a variety of hardware or setting possibilities, but nothing like traditional mobile or game console development -- in which one can expect some level of uniformity among systems.
In other words, iPhone developers can much more easily and affordably offer quality apps at lower prices than their Android counterparts. I'm not saying it's impossible to offer the same quality of user experience across the board, but it is without question a larger undertaking for Android development. And eventually, this WILL affect consumers, too -- either by limiting the size of their pool of quality apps, or by increasing the cost of these same apps.