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?

Comments

Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Follow the money

[mjwx]

On Android, most Android users don't pay for apps. Either because they can't (Google Wallet isn't universal)

Next time, just write "I know nothing about Android" because it'll waste less of our time.

You dont need Google Wallet to purchase apps on Google Play. You can do it with a normal credit card or the Google Play preload cards that are sitting next to the Itunes cards.

Google wallet is a completely different product, whilst it can be used on Google Play, it is not required.

So the Android business model is to sell ads and give the app away

And this ends up being more profitable. Especially over the long term.

There's fragmentation on iOS too...

[Sebby]

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) {....}

Re:It's not just the fragmentation

[nwf]

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.

Re:It's not just the fragmentation

[danbob999]

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.

Re:Who's Afraid of Android Fragmentation?

[Rob Y.]

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.