Android Co-Founder: Fragmentation "an Overblown Issue"

curtwoodward writes "Sure, developers might pull their hair out trying to keep track of all the versions of the Android operating system scattered across hundreds of millions of mobile devices worldwide. But a co-founder of Android says the OS's fragmentation problem is being blown out of proportion. At an event this week in Boston, Rich Miner — now a partner at Google Ventures — said some level of fragmentation is inevitable with Android's reach and the number of partners in the ecosystem. But things are getting better, he said, and in any case most consumers don't notice the difference: `This is a bit of an overblown issue, frankly.'"

Comments

Consumers may not notice ...

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but I as a developer sure do notice. The biggest issue I keep running into (developing backend software for my companies frontend software) is that testing on a mix of devices means learning the quirks for every single manufacturers user interface that they have bolted on top of Android. We've also had some weird issues based upon the Android version installed, across two devices with the same Android version number (4.0 for example) with the carrier/device manufacturers changes we have a bug on one but not the other.

This is highly annoying.

One issue that Android users hail as the greatest thing since sliced bread (alternate keyboards) actually meant having to write work-arounds because some keyboard implementations were simply broken, or actually caused issues with entering text in certain situations. An alternate keyboard shouldn't be able to have that sort of an effect!

Fragmentation is real, and it is an issue. Consumers don't notice because they only use a single device, developers and power users that may switch more often than the average user will notice and it is an issue.

Re:Yeah.

[mjwx]

He never said it wasn't a problem. He simply stated it was overblown - ie, it's an issue, but not as big an issue as people (read: Apple and Microsoft) are making it out to be.

This,

Fragmentation is a minor issue for developers, it only crops up when you're trying to do specific things. If you target Android 1.5 then it will work on versions 1.5 to current (4.2), however if you target 4.0, your application might not work on version 2.3.

Thats the extent of fragmentation technical issues. For the consumer, Google Play filters incompatible applications for them.

The big problem with fragmentation is that Apple and Microsoft have nothing worse to bang on about as Android eats their lunch.