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There have been a lot of articles recently accusing Google of dropping the ball with Android by creating “fragmentation” within the Android platform.  This references either the number of base O/S versions (currently three versions make up 99.5% of active Android phones) or the fact that HTC, Motorola, Sony and others often put some of their own software on top of Android.

This trend of complaining about fragmentation has now extended as far as complaining about the iPhone OS (recently re-branded as iOS).  This new complaint is that Apple has also somehow fragmented their platform by introducing new devices with different hardware capabilities, in particular screen resolutions and densities (think iPad versus iPhone 4).

While it makes developer’s lives easier to have a single hardware platform to target, it’s also something that we are not used to.  From the earliest days of home computers there has been a huge variety of hardware and software to contend with.  Today’s desktop landscape is no different – developers need to decide which basic platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux) and what versions (Windows XP, Vista, 7?) of those platforms they are willing to support.

The development of larger and higher resolution screens isn’t fragmentation – it’s progress.  The Android platform provides a set of easy to use mechanisms that mostly make the extra size and screen density transparent to the developer.  Similarly the SDK makes it easy to know when you are using a feature that does not exist on earlier versions of the platform.  You can then either make it optional, or if you truly need such a feature, drop support for older phones and be glad that Google’s rapid pace of development makes your application possible at all.

When considering the mobile application environment today I think there are far more pressing issues than additional phone screen sizes to be concerned about.  The 30% cut that Apple and Google take from every application sold, Apple’s active censorship of artists and arbitrary banning of applications are far bigger and more pressing issues.

Tags: android, development, iPhone
Posted in Android | Comments Off on It’s not fragmentation – it’s progress