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Android fragmentation?

F

Faux Carnival

Lurker
Hi guys, now that Android 3.0 Honeycomb is launched for tablets, is the fragmentation over?

Do tablet producers still shape the operating system as they wish? At least now that the buttons are gone, they won't be able to fit different numbers of buttons to their devices.
 
OEM's will always come up with new ideas to get an edge in the market. Some won't make any sense but the good ones will push the platform forward.
For example, I would really like a pressure sensitive stylus so that I could draw on a tablet without having to sit next to my PC. HTC and Asus have android tablets with a stylus but not as powerful as xoom. So it is just the beginning.
 
I am for variety, contribution and open source and all but as I was arguing with an Apple fanboy friend of mine, he argued that because of this fragmentation developers can't guarantee that an app from the Android Store will work on your device. All producers bend the OS as they wish and that makes the Android Store unreliable. Plus they load all apps with ads.

Is this true?
 
I keep reading how fragmentation its bad. My question is MS windows, for sake of argument, 98 to win 7 is still currently used. They run on all kind of hardware and screen sizes. I have never heard fragmentation being used against Windows. why is fragmentation such a big deal on Android?
 
I am for variety, contribution and open source and all but as I was arguing with an Apple fanboy friend of mine, he argued that because of this fragmentation developers can't guarantee that an app from the Android Store will work on your device. All producers bend the OS as they wish and that makes the Android Store unreliable. Plus they load all apps with ads.
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You are correct there. But the pro of this multi-hardware running same Android version approach is consumers have many choices compared to iPhone users who will basically see pretty much the same hardware with others.

As for apps with ads it is becuz the Android is Open Source == free which lead to consumers to believe any apps developed using Android SDK should be free. But what consumers don't know is we developers spend quite a lot of time learning, experimenting, fixing bugs etc behind the scenes work. So not to disappoint the consumers, we make it free but supplement our effort with ads.

In Apple, it is quite different. Quite a lot of apps are paid. I would presume the thinking is the same. Consumers associate Apple to pay monies and hence apps developed using paid Apple SDK is to be paid.

An analogy would be say a plumber fixing a new tap for my house. What I would care to think about is the cost of the tap and I frequently forget the effort and labor the plumber undertakes to fix the tap for me isn't it ? So software development is the same, consumers would think Apple SDK need pay monies so I pay for that SDK the developers used to make the app. But what about the effort and labor we developers incurred while making the app ?
 
I thought all this time that fragmentation software was developed to prevent overworking the hard drive in a PC, or at least to make us think it was. But a droid or a pad has no hard drive, so why do we need it, or even think so?
 
Faux Carnival said:
because of this fragmentation developers can't guarantee that an app from the Android Store will work on your device.
Click to expand...

Actually they can. Developers can set the compatible OS versions (and even hardware devices) during compilation, and incompatible devices shouldn't be offered an app by the Market.

jefboyardee said:
I thought all this time that fragmentation software was developed to prevent overworking the hard drive in a PC
Click to expand...

In this case "fragmentation" is used to describe the fact that there are several different versions of the Android OS in current use, and/or the way various manufacturers customise the stock OS with their own overlay.
 
Oops, call me Rip Van Winkle. With your definition, I’d have to think my Optimus S is a good example of fragmentation -- they released Gingerbread, it was a disaster, they released a removal patch, now they’re skittish about releasing anything. And with such a paltry phone, they probably shouldn’t have bothered in the first place.
 
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