14 
Ice Cream Sandwich is now installed on 10-per cent of active Android devices, according to Google’s own numbers. About 64-per cent of users are still using Gingerbread. And the latest iteration of Android, Jelly Bean, is already on its way.When developers express concern about Android fragmentation, this is what they mean.
Users are distributed over so many different versions of the OS that it’s hard to develop for a wide swath. Not to mention that the latest and greatest updates take forever to hit the masses. [Android.com via Business Insider]
What Is Ice Cream Sandwich?
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rtoo angrrrrry to tyhpe
/rage
Seriously though, this is the third article devoted entirely to Android fragmentation in the last two months. Surely to god there’s something more newsworthy…
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/05/when-people-discuss-android-fragmentation-this-is-what-they-mean/
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/06/ios-vs-android-fragmentation-apple-users-stay-current/
Yeah, patent disputes
You’re complaining about three articles out of roughly 3,000 posts?! Wow. And here was me (and the rest of the commenters) thinking the post was quite even-handed with its tone…
You’re complaining about one user comment out of how many thousands of comments?! Wow. And here I thought it wasn’t the job of editors to criticize readers… ?
Hey, it’s part of my job to reply to commenters. And I can give as good as I get.
It isn’t balanced. Frankly, fragmentation is a non-issue to the developer OR the consumer. Devices aren’t forced to download crippling updates, and there’s mechanisms within Android that make programming for so many platforms at once very easy. The only REAL problem with fragmentation is within hardware, not software, yet gratuitous statements of how “developers express concern about Android fragmentation” just seem to be rehearsed without any sort of credence.
You’ll probably glaze over this without really taking much out, and I understand that. Just please, PLEASE, for the inevitable next article about Android fragmentation, gather some more information than “people are on x version”. All that does is prove fragmentation exists, not that it’s an issue.
But it IS an issue. It’s an issue when Joe Public doesn’t understand why s/he can’t do the same things as their friend who also has an Android phone, even from the same manufacturer!
Believe it or not, but we actually speak to developers all the time at events, or have friends who are developers. One of my good friends works on a certain award-winning TV-streaming app, and is always bitching to me about it.
Let’s just agree to disagree here; I really don’t have much time to flesh it through in the comments today, I’m afraid
Okay, okay. I’ll let you off this time Hannaford!
I’d love to see a feature with a big-time dev about the differences between the platforms. Make it happen, yeah?
The thing is, a lot of developers are happy to whinge about it in a pub, or when the dictaphone is turned off, but the minute you want to quote them on the record, they clam up and worry about how this may affect their relationship with Google / Apple / whatever.
I remember one biggish developer bitching about Apple’s draconian app restrictions on Twitter, which were RTed like wildfire, and then a few months later when he tried to submit a simple app update, it was either really delayed, or rejected (can’t remember which, and frustratingly, I can’t remember which dev it was!) Stuff like that really makes other developers scared to speak out.
That’s understandable. I still don’t buy the mass-apathy to develop for Android, but I’ll take your word for it in the mean time.
soo.. develop for gingerbread? and if you MUST use ICS features, use backported stuff or make it a ICS only app? This horse is so dead I doubt continually bludgeoning it will alleviate the situation in any way…
Most users are on 2.something, with over half on Gingerbread alone. That’s not what I would call bad fragmentation.
If you can get your app to run on 2.2, 2.3 and 4.0 that’s 90% of the market covered.
I think the conclusions that can be drawn from this story are the ICS take-up has been slow and that journalists have been conditioned to bring up fragmentation when talking about Android, even when it’s not actually relevant.
Another Android fragmentation article that doesn’t really add more than the previous articles on fragmentation. We get it, android has more than one version kicking about out there. However android also has more than one phone to support.
I’m on 2.1, and not changing until I get my updgrade due in September. My phone still does all of it’s phone type functions adequately enough for me, and would struggle running anything beyond 2.2. I’m sure most of those people still on 2.x are on there because their phone still works. As they upgrade their phones the numbers will reduce, and in a year or two Gizmodo will be filled with “OMG, only x% of people are on android 10.5! Why are people still using 4.0?”
I doubt the fact that Apple and others are hellbent on keeping new android phones off the market is particularly helping the situation either. Haven’t they successfully blocked sale of most ICS enabled devices over the pond now?
Just Samsung devices IIRC, and the case is still ongoing.
See? This is why I prefer Giz UK to Giz US. Instead of proclaiming the death of Android, you people have accurately identified this fragmentation ‘issue’ as a dead horse that was beaten a long, long time ago.
I don’t know if the blogosphere will eventually get over the notion that Google do things differently to Apple, but it will be a happy day when they finally catch up with the rest of us.
While I’d like to claim your gratitude and cash it at the machine by the door, I must admit that this post was actually syndicated from Giz US…!
Why can you VPN to the US, connect to Gizmodo.com and get the US site, or force the .co.uk site, but you can’t force the US .com site from the UK?
Because people from the UK will go to gizmodo.com, even when they want the UK site. ‘.com’ is supposed to be a generic, international TLD, though it’s also the most common TLD in the US.
If you want to force it, us.gizmodo.com will take you straight to the US site.
Thanks for helping your fellow commenter out — we actually link to the US site using that URL in our footer, below, and understand if people prefer the US site.
Like ScyBy said, using us.gizmodo.com gets you there. We actually link to that URL in our site footer, below.
The great thing about the fragmentation stories these days is they can no longer say “fragmentation will kill android” because that particular pile of horsecrap was proved wrong some time ago.
As for the delay ICS is a whole different kettle of fish to gingerbread and the fact is there will be a large rump of phones that will never be officially updated due to the difficulty of doing so. Once cm9 becomes stable (and that has taken longer due to the afformentioned difficulties) those numbers will change. But 3.0 should be considered a wall much like 2.0 was, not everyone will make it over.
I always wondered why cyanogen mod was able to achieve something in a matter of weeks that companies take years or not even ever.
Whilst the CM team do have a reputation of releasing quality ROMs, it’s only for the sake of vanity that they test any of their releases – not in a negative sense, mind, but they’re not making money. OEMs, on the contrary, will be hit far harder if anything goes wrong because people expect their releases to be perfect, and if not they won’t repeat purchases or recommend products.
It’s because they don’t need to undergo any of the testing and certification that the companies do. so I’d imagine supporting older phones becomes a chore.
CM can pretty much chuck out their releases at will. If there’s a bug they can rejig something and release a new ROM the next day.
Here’s a post by Sony Ericsson about their process.
http://developer.sonymobile.com/wp/2011/12/07/ice-cream-sandwich-from-source-code-release-to-software-upgrade/
News News Andriod is fragmented! Oh wait… We already knew that
I’m in the Jelly Bean Percentage and will always have the latest Android OS so it doesn’t bother me. Also people who don’t have the latest most likely don’t care so it doesn’t bother them either.
Only people who seem to care are people with iPhones who still do not have flash player.
Although Android is dropping it in 4.1 so maybe IOS was ahead of the competition in this regard.
As for fragmentation, it doesn’t help that some devices can not be upgraded to the latest version due to hardware requirements. Its not necessarily a bad thing either. Its a way of making people move forwards with their technology. The alternative would be people walking around with 10 year old devices complaining that they do not do the same things as the newer models and getting all upset about it.
First, Android aren’t dropping Flash, Adobe are. I don’t think this is for any reason but complacency. They have 100mil downloads on the app market which dwarfs the overwhelming majority, and more than anything, they have something no one else can even touch in terms of functionality with a vast army of competent developers using the platform. The reason it was dropped, as deduced from their treatment of the platform on desktops, is that the just couldn’t be arsed to make it work right. If it was a new product they could make lots of exciting refinements and everything would be lovely. As it stands, Flash is just getting more and more bloated and less usable.
And your second point is on the money. There’s no point releasing ICS for my Hero because it just couldn’t handle it, and it makes no commercial sense to release it on my Desire because it’s over two years old. Alas, they could go the way of Apple and call it ICS but restrict half the functionality… go figure.
I agree – Flash is getting more and more bloated – that’s why apple dropped it several years ago. But many Android users used this to beat the Apple fanboys. I was just commenting on how after the years of comments, Apple have been proved correct with this.
As for the developers, I think most develop apps for Android and Apple. I just wonder if the fact of neither of them using Flash could be seen as a good thing as the developers may be able to do slightly less programming to bring the same app out on both platforms.
Going slightly off topic…
In an ideal world for a developer, I am sure they would like to see both the Appstore and Googleplay (and possibly others) get together and come up with a standardised app format of sorts so the developers only have to create one version of the App to be released across all manufacturers, and enable people not to be locked into a single ecosystem. But unfortunately there’s too much money at play for that to ever become a realistic proposal.
I still think it’s a good platform, personally. Yes, lots of the things we now see in HTML5 diminishes the need for extra software, but web standards are hardly at a level whereby we can completely get rid of Flash. The thing that has been proved is that Adobe are shit, and okay, Apple did call this a while back.
Flash isn’t something developers just throw into an app here and there to spice things up, it’s a stand-alone thing like Unity and MS Silverlight. The removal of Flash just means Flash developers have less choice of systems which can only be a bad thing.
And re: OT, it’ll never happen because different people are creating the software. Apps are made to comply with the OS’ themselves, each of which are made differently. But anyways, developers have had to deal with programming for several OS’ since the early days of consumer computing – see: Linux vs Apple vs Microsoft. Yes, it’d be lovely to get everybody playing nicely, but individuality leads to perks too such as the customisation of Android and the quality of iOS.
You don’t care that iOS is where the developers head to first? Despite Android having higher market share? Google adds new APIs for developers to make better apps but if no one has the latest version then developers won’t bother. iOS has better apps and it will stay that way until Android becomes easier to develop for.
Until last year Windows XP had 50%, usage and that is almost 10 years old. HOLD THE FRONT PAGE.
who cares.. i got Android and i just cant be arsed to update.. ALSO.. the older HTCs have the worst internal memory and as a result are all running with the warning notification on all the god dam day! so there is no room to update without erasing most of the apps of the phone first, i know you could erase, install then reinstall but for what? its not really worth the effort on an older smart phone. AND CAN SOMEONE TELL FACEBOOK THAT I WANT TO EITHER MOVE THE DAM APP TO THE SD CARD OR ERASE IT WITHOUT HAVING TO JAILBREAK MY PHONE!! *rant over*
Obviously not the fault of Google. I’ve just learned that my own phone – Xperia Play – has been dropped from the ICS update due to inability to iron out bugs on the manufactorer’s part… :[