Slashdot Mirror
Who's Afraid of Android Fragmentation?
Nerval's Lobster writes: The dreaded term "fragmentation" has been applied to Android more times than anyone can count over the past half-decade. That's part of the reason why game developers often build for iOS before Android, even though Android offers a bigger potential customer base worldwide, and more types of gaming experiences. Fortunately, new sets of tools allow game developers to build for one platform and port their work (fairly) easily to another. "We've done simultaneously because it is such a simple case of swapping out the textures and also hooking up different APIs for scores and achievements," London-based indie developer Tom Vian told Dice. "I've heard that iOS is a better platform to launch on first, but there's no sense for us in waiting when we can spend half a day and get it up and running." So is fragmentation an overhyped roadblock, or is it a genuine problem for developers who work in mobile?
You are confusing market share with profit share.
It's been shown in many studies that the vast majority of android users do not buy any apps and are mostly on low end devices that wouldn't be able to play the better games anyway.
That's the real reason why devs have an iOS first approach.
As more and more devices of varying features and sizes have been released by Apple, there's been more and more work developers have had to do to adopt the different sizes/features of those devices (I still see new releases on the app store that state a new feature of "Support for iPhone 5S size" or similar)
It hasn't been until recently that Apple has given developers the tools to create views that don't need to know the specifics of the device it's running on, thereby avoiding silly checks like
if(device == IPHONE) {....} else if(device == IPAD) {....}
AC comments get piped to
There'll be forks, there'll be distros that die out but ultimately choice is good. Out of all the traditional Linux distributions eventually a status quo develops of some core popular ones. Over time they fall out of favour and the critical mass slowly moves to another. In the medium term maybe some fresh eyes and fresh thinking will solve some of the current issues that plague users now. Will they have vested interests? May they take things down a path that turns out ba? At times, probably but there's a fork for that
Indeed. This article seems to be from the Wizard of Oz camp. Pay no attention to the serious problems, look here at this non-problem! The serious problems being rampant piracy and overall lack of software sales.
I've developed for both and indeed iOS is getting more annoying to develop for. Android, well, it's basically the same as it's been. It looks nicer, but it appears to be designed (overall) by people on the theoretical side and not the practical side (activities and fragments come to mind.) Doing interesting UI stuff is too annoying. On the other hand, I've found that non-game apps work pretty well across devices, but not so much OS versions. Networking is still painfully slow compared to iOS.
I don't know, but it works for me.
Meanwhile, there is this PC platform that wiped out all of it's other bespoke competitors probably before you even touched your first computer. PCs are MUCH more diverse than Android phones. But if you started whining about "fragmentation" to PC developers they would look at you like you grew a second head.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
One of the reason people developed for iOS first was the platform had users who on average had higher incomes and spent more money on apps. So if you were trying to develop an application to sell it was more likely to show a return. Also there is more piracy of apps on Android.
It depends how you get your return. This of course does not apply to free applications. And most are free.
Most non-gamers do not pay for software on their PC either. Except Windows and Office, most used software is free. Web Browser, media player, text editor, file archiver, chat/video client, PDF reader, even most developer tools (IDE, compilers, version control).
I don't understand why people are expected to buy more software on their phone then on their PC.
I've heard stories about "the fragmented linux landscape"(tm). And yet I've seen programs specifically targeting some other system, and I have no problem getting it going on whatever version of Linux I'm running. And when I was in university they had Sun boxen for labs (it was the target system), and I would write software on my home computer running Linux, and then change 2 lines (locations of library paths), and recompile and the software --advanced networking software-- would run without fail on the Sun boxen. I even got extra credit for making my software cross platform. And so its incompatible, just like Bill Gates has wanted all of his software to be since 1991. Except that getting rid of the "in" and making it compatible is in most cases a very minor thing. Compilers even give big fat whopping hints about how to fix things. And if you have half-a-bit of game at all, you can do the whole job in 5 minutes. Oh and one more thing about profit share vs market share: this has gone on for a long time in the computing world. Company A sells product at HighPrice, Company B sells product at LowPrice. (lets say the first is Sony and Betamax or Rambus, or the IBM and the microchannel bus; and the second is competitors and VHS or everyone else, or everyone else and the IDE bus). And the cheaper version wins out every time. As for 3rd party developers, Apple doesn't share profits with them, and a lot of people with phones are saying "I spent $5000 on a phone and now they want more for games or apps" as opposed to someone who says "I spent $300 on a phone, and now I have bux left over for 50 apps and 30 games and still have spent less than 10% of that Apple guy over there".
No, I meant I blame him that I'm going to spend the evening watching a movie with Steve Guttenberg in it.
I'd mod you 'funny' if I didn't think you meant it. Android has hundreds of millions of users. Ubuntu probably has a few million (maybe tens of millions). Other distros, even fewer. If numbers mean anything, it should be obvious which of these accounts for "Linux's success"?
Linux fragmentation is good in the sense that it's openness has allowed it to usher in whole new device categories (TiVo, Chromecast, Raspberry, home NAS boxes, etc). The one thing that Linux fragmentation has not helped is desktop adoption and especially 3rd party application development, which is still practically non-existent. And I use Linux as my primary desktop, so this isn't some uninformed rant.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...