Devs Grapple With 100+ Versions of Android

Barence writes "The scale of the challenge facing Android developers has been laid bare by Twitter client TweetDeck. During beta testing of its new software, TweetDeck encountered more than 36,000 testers using an enormous pool of 244 different handsets. Not only was hardware for the platform fragmented, but Tweetdeck had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android, highlighting just how muddled the market is for the open-source platform. The splintering of Android is making life difficult for app developers. 'It's not particularly harder to develop for Android over iPhone (from a programming standpoint),' said Christopher Pabon, a developer who writes apps for both the iPhone and Android platforms. 'Except when it comes to final quality assurance and testing. Then it can be a nightmare (a manageable nightmare, mind you).'"

Comments

Re:sounds to me like that you are

[LucidBeast]

missing the point.

Re:sounds to me like android is guilty of

[node 3]

iOS is significantly more successful than Android, and yet does not have this problem.

Apple FUD? Adobe Air marketing?

[yyxx]

That sounds like Apple-placed FUD to me, or maybe they are trying to market Adobe Air as the "solution" to this "problem". Tweetdeck is written in Adobe Air; maybe that's the source of their problems. (And, frankly, I think Tweetdeck kind of sucks anyway. I deleted it from my iPad.)

I have several Android phones, from 1.6 to 2.2, all with different screen sizes, and most software just runs on all of them without problems. The Android programs I have written didn't require anything special to be done either.