

Android's "Extreme Fragmentation," Colorfully Visualized by TweetDeck's Team - ESchmidtSeesYou
http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/13/visualized-tweetdeck-beta-usage-chart-beautifully-showcases-and/
Will Windows Phone 7 be anywhere near as hacker friendly? Keep in mind xda-developers originally formed as a Windows Mobile community.
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wccrawford
"extreme fragmentation."

Kind of like IBM compatibles? Or maybe Java-capable phones?

Diversity of hardware is not something to be afraid of. Yes, it can cause a
few difficulties, but it also provides a much wider market to sell to at the
same time.

Choice is good.

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gvb
The first pie chart is split by hardware and shows only adoption (a _good_
thing), not fragmentation.

The second pie chart is split by OS ID strings. While it shows fragmentation,
it hugely exaggerates it because it counts all builds of a given version, say
of 2.2, as unique even though they are built from the same or similar (i.e.
bugfixed) sources. Besides that, there a a _lot_ of single digit builds that
are unidentifiable based on the name - what version of Android are the two
copies of "Interceptor V5", for instance?

As a thought exercise, imagine what that pie chart would look like for any
phone OS other than iOS. Symbian <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_OS> and
Windows Mobile <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_mobile> (soon to become
fragmented again as WP7) both have several major version (i.e. true
fragmentation) and _many, many_ different handset manufacturers and flavors
within each major version.

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nl
Or imaging plotting the different user-agent strings for a website.

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ShabbyDoo
For how many of those phones did TweetDeck have to make special
accommodations? That there are many OS identification strings is not itself a
problem. Fragmentation ought to be measured by differences on non-fundamental
axes. Screen resolution differences are a good thing for users who want a
choice of form factors, and developers at least know that they have to deal
with both big and small screens. Axes like "strange combinations of API calls
required to make the GPS provide a current position" (I'm making that one up)
have no associated user benefit. The issue of dealing with multiple releases
from Google isn't helped by the handset manufacturers/carriers being slow to
provide upgrades, but I'd sure rather deal with multiple, known API levels
than worry about platform stagnation killing my business.

With that said, I have yet to write a mobile app, so I don't have real-world
experience. It's the lack of definition around "fragmentation" that is
bothersome to me. What are some real issues faced by those here who have
targeted a wide range of Android devices?

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arnorhs
Original source: <http://blog.tweetdeck.com/android-ecosystem>

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ESchmidtSeesYou
Yes, thank you kindly.

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bretpiatt
Keep in mind that this is a ~35k user sample size of people downloading the
TweetDeck beta application -- this is not "my mom" with an Android phone so I
would recommend you don't look at this as a valid sample for the overall
Android market.

The way to ensure the diversity remains compatible is by building a strong
ecosystem around it that requires that compatibility -- the x86 ecosystem is a
perfect example. By building applications that work with the Android mainline
you create gravity forcing others to follow that path as well.

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nl
If you read the source article, they say " _From our perspective it's pretty
cool to have our app work on such a wide variety of devices and Android OS
variations._ "

Saying Android is fragmented because of many unique OS strings is kind of like
saying the web is fragmented because of many unique user-agent strings.

It's apparent that TweetDeck understand this, but it seems Engadget just
highlighted the "Fragmentation" aspect to drive page views.

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amanuel
I thought testing a bunch of browsers for my web apps sucked.

If seeing that doesn't scare you...you obviously don't care much about testing
or user experience.

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ESchmidtSeesYou
Will Windows Phone 7 be anywhere near as hacker friendly? Keep in mind xda-
developers originally formed as a Windows Mobile community.

