Fragmentation Comes To iOS

dell623 writes "While the fragmentation issues in iOS are nowhere near as bad as Android, it can no longer be considered non existent. I have prepared a chart showing which features will be available on which device. While some restrictions are the result of hardware limitations, it is clear that Apple has deliberately chosen to limit some previous generation devices, and figuring this out isn't always straightforward if you're not buying the latest iPad or iPhone."

Comments

I don't get it...

[mark-t]

Starting with the retina display, the programming API's for the iPhone took a one-way trip away from utilizing absolute pixel measurements, and referring to screen positions by resolution-independant "points", instead. In this way, coupled with the usage of floating point values for screen positions instead of integers, code would be made entirely resolution independent, without having to inquire about the phone's physical pixel resolution. All of the iPhone screens up until that time, whether retina display or not, were considered to be the same dimensions in these "point" sizes, so the same code could look and work exactly the same both on pre-retina and post-retina displays (perhaps only being of higher fidelity on the latter).

Now Apple decides it's time to make a phone with an entirely different aspect ratio. Really, what was the point of bothering with the resolution-independent screen positioning in their API's in the first place if they were just going to go and produce a completely different screen size that the programmer is going to have to write extra code to account for anyways?

A feature comparison != fragmentation

[Anubis IV]

Apparently the author of the "article" doesn't understand the distinction. I'm disappointed the editors let this one in.

Re:It's pretty clear....

[Mike Buddha]

iOS fragmentation is far worse than Android fragmentation, because the Apple App Store has no problem selling you software that you can't use on your devices. Google Play won't let you buy an app that won't work on your device, which mitigates a lot of the problems that exist because of fragmentation.

It's annoying because decent software will get rated down on the App Store because it doesn't work on the iPad 1 and angry suckers leave low ratings to show their anger at Apple's incompetence.