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.