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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).'"
2.2, 2.1 update 1, 2.1, something called 020201 (2.0?) and 1.6 account for almost all of the users. The remainder are custom ROMs you're not really obliged to support. Not that having five major releases operating in the wild is much better, mind.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
and HTC's If-rooted-Reload-default-OS feature,
That's funny, my rooted Evo, which I bought a few weeks after its launch, is still rooted and I am under no obligation to run any OTA updates offered. So yeah, I enjoy being able to use my phone as a wifi hotspot paired up with my netbook, along with any other feature that requires root.
failed experiment that proves that Carriers' and Manufacturers' greed will kill any open source advantages that Android could have brought.
Exactly what advantages? How is a phone with a variety of options any better or worse than a phone without those options? The advantages I find with my phone are that I was able to choose which phone I wanted, nothing more. I don't really care that I can go and look at the code and modify it to do whatever I want. I care that I have a choice between a variety of hardware vendors and carriers. I wanted 4g speeds, and I wanted a plan that suited how I use my phone. So for my monthly price, I get unlimited data at speeds far greater than any other phone, and I can share that unlimited data with other devices. This is win.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
(Only the Nexus one and some tablets have 2.2).
Wrong. Droid, Droid 2, Droid X from Motorola are all on 2.2.
HTC has several 2.2 Phones (Incredible, Evo 4G, Desire)
Your information is dated.
it is not different, and we (android users) still have the same problem that PC gamers have: random video card glitches, this game doesn't work while i have program X open, game X performs better in SP3 compat mode, etc. I'm not for or against it, but it is absolutely an issue. One of the reasons i have moved 75% of my gaming to the console - just pop the disk in and get a polished experience.
Eventually I just RTFA, yeah yeah I know - and what I said above is not targeted at this particular developer. For those who didn't RTFA, TweetDeck's blogpost only mentions how proud they are that their app runs on over a hundred combinations of hardware and ROM versions. Their app is exactly the kind of example I had in mind for the developers who can do (vs. the devs who just whine).
Not entirely true; a good deal of Android ROMs implement changes at the system level. The latest version of Cyanogenmod, for instance, has a modified kernel that uses BFS scheduling instead of the default (round-robin?), uses a modified audio library stack (for supporting system-wide DSP effects and equalizer), and uses Apps2SD for space-constrained devices, just to name a few. Testing on all of *those* platforms IS a nightmare, especially since those ROMs have issues even with native apps! However, I would think that targeting the most popular platforms (Android 2.2, 2.1 and 1.6 stock, along with the Droid and Galaxy S ROMs) would be much more reliable, since most people run one of those variations anyway.