The shocking toll of hardware and software fragmentation on Android development

http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/03/30/the-shocking-toll-of-hardware-and-software-fragmentation-on-android-development

by j_col • 14 years ago

84 83 14 years ago

damian2000• 14 years ago

If you are a developer thinking about choosing between iOS or Android, well after reading this article the decision is easy.

djmdjm• 14 years ago

Which part? The fragmentation or the bit about the Android version hitting "1 million downloads in just 3 days"?

shareme• 14 years ago

the article is link bait..

How do I know? Because the same fragmentation exists on iphone but smaller in quantities..to say it is not there on iphone is a bit somewhat lying like republicans..

Now lets see someone be honest about this on both platforms or STFU

cageface5• 14 years ago

The degree of variation in iOS is nothing like what you find on Android.

objclxt• 14 years ago

I run a 10-person development team, split 50:50 Android / iOS, under a digital agency. We build apps for carriers (account management apps), brands, etc.

From my own personal experience, which having built apps since the first iOS SDK and Android 1.6 is hopefully fairly reliable, the QA and testing burden on Android apps is considerably higher than iOS.

That in itself isn't totally surprising, because there are far more handsets on the market. But that's not the real issue: say I'm writing an app for a network carrier. Carriers typically want their apps to run on all hardware they've sold for the past two years (ie, everyone who's still under contract).

On iOS, that's iOS 3-5. Very soon, it'll be iOS 4-5 - 4 was released in June 2010.

On Android, that's 1.6, 2.0, 2.2, 2.3, 3.0, and 4.0. Because the key difference is when Apple release a new version of iOS, they stop selling the old one. But that's not the case with Android. Even today there are still phones on the market running 2.1.

When you say "the same fragmentation exists on iPhone but smaller in quantities" - I don't really think you know what you're talking about. If you're developing an app now you can pretty easily support iOS 4.3 upwards, which would cover all handsets being actively sold by Apple for the past 21 months or so (the 3GS onwards, or three phone models and two tablets)). How many Android phones running how many versions have been released in the past 21 months? Far, far more.

This doesn't inherently make Android a bad platform: lots of people choose to develop PC games even though there's a much higher testing burden that consoles (in terms of the varying environments and OS versions). I think Android is great: I'm not arguing against developing for it. But I think you'd be very hard pressed to find someone experienced with both the iOS and Android platforms who'd disagree with the notion that fragmentation on Android takes up a lot more time to deal with than iOS.

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

Apple's major versions come out once a year, while Android's about twice per year. In this case Android 2.1 (early 2010) is even newer than iOS 3.0. Are you saying nobody has an iOS 3.0 iPhone anymore?

I don't think phasing out versions is a big deal for Android. It happens about as fast as for iOS (~3 years). What is a bigger deal is how fast the latest OS/API gets adopted. iOS can push out the new version in days to at least 50%-75% of the users, while for Android it takes about a year to be on 75% of the devices (that's how long it took for Gingerbread).

And the issue with that is that users don't get to take advantage too much of the most cutting edge software, until months after release, when (or if) they get their upgrade, while on iOS they can do that just days later.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

What I'm curious about why it is fragmentation is such an issue on mobile devices, when it was never this big a deal on desktops. Outside of cutting-edge 3D games, Windows developers don't need to have 100 laptops to test all the different hardware permutations for their software.

sskates• 14 years ago

Dropbox had this problem actually, where certain versions of Windows would give them trouble. Luckily it wasn't hardware specific as well (AFAIK).

flyt• 14 years ago

- Dell, HP, Compaq, Acer, etc didn't invent entirely new UI's for the computers they sold: everybody's OS looked basically identical and had similar interface elements and metaphors.

- Screen sizes and resolutions increased slowly and didn't involve taking over the entire screen as with smartphones. Software that previously took up the whole screen at 1024x768 simply ran as a smaller window at 2560x1440 and wasn't forced to scale up to full screen.

ericd7• 14 years ago

Android apps that are designed for smaller screens leave black space on the new mega-screened phones. Users pan you in the reviews pretty hard for this, though. The expectations for apps that conform properly to every phone are a lot higher than they used to be on early PCs, I think.

masklinn• 14 years ago

> What I'm curious about is why is fragmentation such an issue on mobile devices, when it was never this big a deal on desktops.

Stable APIs and abstractions, better renderers, ability not to go fullscreen and nobody caring about dpi. Resolutions changed very slowly, especially before the 00s and 3D games. Also culture, somewhat, probably: if the game does not work due to a bizarre combination of drivers it's the users problem.

And it's definitely not true that "it was never this big a deal on desktops", stable hardware target is regularly mentioned as a reason to go console by developers.

intended2• 14 years ago

Heck it was never a big deal is factually incorrect. IT is STILL a big deal:

Fragmentation means your ATI card not working one day, or your novice user having to go dig through pages of support to figure out how to debug a faulty driver.

Or its your printer not working on XP, but working on 7 || your games being unplayable on one set up and working on another without a hiccup || any of a massive set of issues that people take for granted when they have to deal with PCs.

Fragmentation is an issue, its just that people have gotten used to it and familiar with it.

Fragmentation IS a problem and remains that way.

gcp3• 14 years ago

I would say its a much of a deal on mobile as it is on desktop. The problem is how badly Android is doing here compared to Apple. If there were only Android, the problem would be the same for the developers, but they'd accept it in return for the income.

Right now, if you can only target one platform, it's a no-brainer against Android.

Note that you say "outside of cutting-edge 3D games", but remember that games are a significant part of apps. And cutting-edge on an Android device doesn't have to mean that much.

Lastly, consider how console game sales are doing compared to PC game sales. And how developers tend to treat PC game development as a result.

stephengillie• 14 years ago

I was going to make this exact post. I realized that:

1. a lot of this is handled by APIs

2. we still have to deal with hardware issues, such as having the correct video driver and a correctly configured OS to play non-casual videogames. Some programs refuse to work with certain hardware, like Dungeon Master 2 not running with Creative sound cards.

njharman• 14 years ago

20yrs of working to get it right. im old enough to remember all the fragmentation and end user pain in the early years after IBM PC/XT

androidVmobile is still immature market. itll sort out in a handfull of years.

btilly• 14 years ago

Yes, Android is a free-wheeling mess. But I am not concerned.

I see this as a replay of the 1980s. Apple was the dominant player with a premium option on nice hardware, a consolidated set of software options, and facing fragmented opposition. (Then the PC/Windows landscape. Now Android.)

Then Steve Jobs was yanked from the picture (then by being fired, now by dying), Apple lost its focus, and the fact that so many people were on the messy platform caused it to win in the marketplace.

There are big differences. Tim Cook is hopefully not as incompetent as John Sculley proved to be. Google is not Microsoft reborn.

But we've seen this before. The rule of thumb in computers for decades has been, "the commodity always wins". And Android is better positioned to be that commodity than Apple is.

schraeds• 14 years ago

Not to mention that the PC vs. Mac wars have come full circle. With PC's becoming completely commoditized, noone able to differentiate/ offer compelling products while Apple's market share and margins continue to grow.

jordanb• 14 years ago

PC margins have always been razor thin and Mac margins have always been better. PCs have always been commodity, that's the whole point. People used to refer to them as "beige boxes."

After his return, Jobs managed to turn Macs into fashion accessories, first with the iMac. This put the Mac into a category where it wasn't competing directly with PCs, where it's been ever sense.

But let's not kid ourselves. Apple lost the battle for the desktop computer in the 80s, and it never regained it. Jobs returned Apple to profitability by giving up on that market and positioned the company into a new one.

One difference that the OP failed to mention, between desktop computers and cellphones, is that cellphones are worn and therefore have always had an element of fashion to them. It's unlikely that cellphones will ever be "beige boxified" since there's no customer that sees them as being purely utilitarian and will ignore physical aesthetics.

yardie2• 14 years ago

Then the commodity is the iPad. Eventually this may change but it's 2012 and a serious competitor hasn't been built yet (going by what I've seen from CES).

There are still some major differences between the early 80s and the current market:

* IBM: They owned the office long before Apple came along and continued that dominance with their invention of PC. IBM isn't in the tablet business. RIM tried to make a play and did poorly. Increasing corporate tablet sales are going to Apple.

* Price: Compared to a Mac the PC was cheap. Nowadays tablet makers are having a hard time building <$500 tablet that will sell.

cageface5• 14 years ago

This is likely to change in the next generation though. Currently the sub-$500 tablets are pretty poor but cheap Tegra 3 devices are going to be good enough for a lot of people.

radicalbyte• 14 years ago

> I see this as a replay of the 1980s. Apple was the dominant player with a premium option on nice hardware

No they weren't. In Job's first stint at Apple he was beaten by Commodore.

Commodore were vertically integrated. They owned the company who designed the chips in early Apple computers. They focussed aggressively on price, and they won the battles with the Vic 20, C64 and early Amigas. After a bunch of crazy decisions at the end of the decade they eventually lost the war and died a death in the mid 90s.

As they say, it's the winner of the war who gets to write the history books, and in Cupertino they're done an excellent job at it.

nkassis• 14 years ago

For those interested, On The Edge by Brian Bagnall (http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/...) does a good job recounting the life and death of Commodore. The management of that company was definitively rocky.

ericd7• 14 years ago

I really, really hate supporting an app on Android. This is a big part of the reason for that.

As an example, at one point it apparently would simply refuse to start on the Droid X, despite running great on the original Droid I had to test it with, and the VM I set up to emulate the X. Without access to a physical Droid X, it couldn't be debugged. The app doesn't require anything from the hardware besides a GPS, so I was at a loss for what would cause this.

Because it's a huge pain to properly test new versions, I tend not to keep the Android version up to speed with the iOS version of the same app. As a result of that, I get a lot of complaints from Android users that feel short changed and bad reviews from people who feel like the app isn't keeping pace with the alternative apps (mostly they use the web app as reference).

It's just a really crappy situation. I've thought about dropping Android support, but then they would just complain that the iOS crowd get an app and they don't, so that wouldn't be much better. At least I wouldn't have a low star rating publicly attached to my brand, though.

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

> As an example, at one point it apparently would simply refuse to start on the Droid X, despite running great on the original Droid I had to test it with, and the VM I set up to emulate the X. Without access to a physical Droid X, it couldn't be debugged. The app doesn't require anything from the hardware besides a GPS, so I was at a loss for what would cause this.

What ended up causing that problem?

ericd7• 14 years ago

It seems to have fixed itself since then, so I never figured it out.

huggyface5• 14 years ago

If your Android app is similar to the screenshots, it really is quite trivial and terrible looking. I don't mean to sound harsh, but it looks like you did the absolute minimum work possible to "support" Android. Blaming feedback on the platform seems like you're being a bit dishonest with yourself.

It's also interesting that you have a lower rating, and more negative feedback (26% 1 star) on iOS than you do on Android.

ericd7• 14 years ago

Yeah, that's pretty harsh given that you haven't tried it. Of course it could be better with more work put toward it, my point was that the platform has made it a pain. Whereas things that worked on the first version of the iOS SDK still work well, the same hasn't been true of Android (mostly the screen sizing). I unfortunately don't have time to update it with new versions of android. I don't dislike Android, but I don't like it as a dev platform. The bad reviews I see of the iOS client are actually mostly unrelated to issues with the client. This is in contrast to the Android side.

In any case, I was mostly referring to the email feedback I get about the two versions.

guelo• 14 years ago

This article is overblown.

In Android you don't have to support any device you don't want to, just exclude it from being shown to those users. Same with the OS version, if you don't want to support 1.6 you can make it unavailable to those users.

Most apps don't have fragmentation problems unless you're doing something tricky and hardware dependent, like trying to do fancy things with the camera. I've released several semi-popular apps with few bug complaints.

If you look at Temple Run in Play you will see it is very highly rated and it has over a million downloads. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.imangi.tem...

Finally, the author's link to one badly voted Reddit comment with little discussion made me think he was just out to write an Android bashing article as link bait.

gcp3• 14 years ago

In Android you don't have to support any device you don't want to, just exclude it from being shown to those users.

This will: 1) Be quite tricky due to the sheer number of devices making it difficult to test everywhere. 2) Only supporting those you know to work isn't viable due to the amount of fragmentation.

Most apps don't have fragmentation problems unless you're doing something tricky and hardware dependent

How about reading from a zipped resource on storage? (10x slower on Galaxy S, in some circumstances, due to filesystem bugs) How about doing an SQL query with a JOIN? (100x slower, in some circumstances, on pre-2.3 devices due to a query optimizer bug in the SQLite version they ship) Showing a splash screen? (Top cut off on Samsung devices running Gingerbread, nowhere else. Still tracing the reason)

Finally, the author's link to one badly voted Reddit comment with little discussion made me think he was just out to write an Android bashing article as link bait.

That's a valid criticism. The author found one person that didn't want to pay a dollar, and a few hundred calling him out on being stupid.

Can we get more income comparisons between popular apps on iOS and Android? That's the real data.

buster• 14 years ago

But it's a bad comparison. Instead of bashing we should be thankful for the choices.

I can't read about this so called fragmentation anymore, it's ridiculously overblown, seriously. First of all, Android provides are really good set of APIs to make the development of apps really easy across multple devices with very different hardwars specs. There may be device specific bugs, but well.. That's business as usual.

If you guys are all for comparison, than write an Android program for 1 device(and test for it) and compare it to the iphone version.

Comparison is really flawed with iOS vs Android, it's stupid.

Also, it's not like iOS apps are bugfree. I have seen enough bugs on my iPad to say that general app quality is not as different as people claim.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

Fragmentation is not that bad of a problem because the distribution is far from even: you can still support most (as in 90%+) with just a handful of types. You van also restrict support by limiting the minimum OS version. The 707 devices supported cover more than 90% of the devices used.

The article is linkbait. And less than stellar journalism. Looks like someone had to fill the weekly quota of articles and took the easy option.

Tichy• 14 years ago

Somehow thousands of Android developers still seem to manage fine. Some parts of the article made me quite suspicious that it was really an Apple marketing piece.

rbarooah4• 14 years ago

Android developers are incurring higher costs for less revenue.

That may be 'fine' but it's still a disadvantage.

babarock3• 14 years ago

Stop complaining about fragmentation and define yourself which devices you support!

It's crazy to think that a common OS among such a wide variety of phones is enough to achieve perfect portability. Let's take an analogy: Your Windows PC runs an OS very similar to the ATM across the street (I'm not even mentioning the wide array of platform Linux runs on). Do you really expect your app to run on all Windows machines flawlessly?

The real issue is that Google is only too happy to brag about number of Android users, or apps in their market (what's the proper naming convention now? Play?). Corporate bullshit meant to appease shareholders and attract developers.

You can sit all day complaining that Android isn't the developer paradise it was advertised, or you can be more pragmatic, restrict yourself to fewer devices and achieve quality.

But we, as developers, are greedy and pretentious. We want our apps to run on every machine possible, and be featured on top of their stupidly competitive "market".

I blame Apple for the broken model (but hey, it works for them), and Google for not knowing better.

brazzy6• 14 years ago

Do you really expect your app to run on all Windows machines flawlessly?

By and large, yes, people expect that and developers largely achieve that. But of course Windows is a much more mature platform than Android.

babarock3• 14 years ago

I think you missed the part where I mention that Windows _runs on an ATM!_ I'm not crazy enough to suggest that Windows apps running on your Dell laptop would run on a Toshiba laptop. After all, they're both clones of the same machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pc_clone)

DanBC• 14 years ago

> Let's take an analogy: Your Windows PC runs an OS very similar to the ATM across the street [...] Do you really expect your app to run on all Windows machines flawlessly?

Yes, I do. (With limited exceptions.)

Software often has minimum specs to run. Apart from games the minimum spec will often be for machines that are obsolete.

So (apart from games) I would expect an app created for one machine running MS Windows to work on another machine capable of running the same version of MS Windows. And those versions of Windows will last for several years.

Compare that with Android as applied to cell phones. Not everyone upgrades their phone every 18 months[1].

dendory2• 14 years ago

I think it's very valid criticism and it can't really be compared with Windows. There's many differences:

- Windows has a lot of APIs and hardware abstraction levels. Microsoft has always been known to change things very, very slowly, and keep backward compatibility.

- Hardware makers don't mess with Windows nearly as much as they do with Android. They will install a Norton trial and that's it. They don't remove the UI and put their own.

- Microsoft acts as a gate to what innovation hardware vendors can bring in, even more so today with driver testing and signing. Remember back in the day when an OEM did something crazy you'd get BSODs from bad drivers. Now that doesn't happen anymore, because everything is so much more robust. Android is still no where near that, and Google isn't doing much, relying on the open community.

huggyface5• 14 years ago

There's many differences

None of your differences are really the differences you think they are.

Android has a lot of APIs and hardware abstraction levels. Of course it does or it wouldn't work across over a thousand devices with a pretty high degree of success.

OpenGL ES 2.0 itself is an abstraction that has allowed for lots of triple-A (relative to mobile) iOS apps to painlessly get ported to the NDK on Android.

To get the market and the Google apps -- to be a Google sanctioned Android device -- the maker has to pass the Android compatibility tests. Should they be more stringent? Absolutely, but they exist and have done a good job.

The linked article is terrible, and horrendously biased, using exaggerated language at every turn. It makes completely unsupported claims at every turn. What Android has accomplished is amazing, and the level of compatibility is incredibly high, but yes with over a thousand devices, not all of which are certified, hundreds of millions of users, and hundreds of thousands of apps, you will find problems. Big surprise.

mrb2• 14 years ago

If you are a mobile software developer who refuses to deal with Android under the pretext it is "fragmented", you will simply be obliterated by your competition. The Android market is so large, and becoming larger every day, that other developers will gladly do the work you refuse to do. And they will succeed, just like the desktop/server software development world has learned how to cope with "fragmentation" in the Windows/Linux ecosystem by supporting the various OS versions, editions, service packs, distributions, locales, etc.

It does not matter what you think about Android fragmentation. It exists. Deal with it.

cageface5• 14 years ago

Seems like a lot of devs outsource their Android ports. I think the individual iOS dev can safely ignore Android, at least for now.

reidmain• 14 years ago

How many more years before I get obliterated? I'm going on three and business is continually climbing for iOS development.

The introduction of the iPad was an amazing boom and its adoption rate continues to soar.

I'm not going to sit on my ass and only focus on doing iOS stuff but for at least the next three years it will easily be my bread and butter.

rbarooah4• 14 years ago

The point about the market being 'large' is the very thing that fragmentation undermines. What matters is how many paying customers can receive a good user experience from your app, and what this costs to provide.

You also assume that Android will continue to outpace iOS in terms of growth - i.e. the trajectory will be like the PC rather than like the iPod.

It matters very much what you think about Android fragmentation. Dealing with it has been a costly mistake for some developers, and could be for you.

mrb2• 14 years ago

This article is obviously biased toward extolling the advantages of iOS's uniformness, yet the best example it takes to argue against Android's fragmentation is an application that fails to support only 7.8% of the Android market! How is this a proof that fragmentation is causing a "shocking toll"?

For the curious, I decompiled this "Temple Run" app. It requires Android 2.2 or higher, because its AndroidManifest.xml declares the use of OpenGL ES 2.0 which was introduced in that version of Android. (And the app's minimum API level is Android 2.1.) The app also needs android.hardware.sensor.accelerometer and android.hardware.touchscreen.multitouch, but virtually all Android 2.2 devices have these capabilities.

So, effectively, Temple Run works on any Android 2.2+ device, which represents 92.2% of the devices in the wild: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve... When the developer says they support 707 of the 1443 unique devices on Android Market, this means that these 707 devices represent 92.2% of the market, whereas the article tries to present this as "only half the market is supported".

Yet another article written by an iOS fanboy trying to unfairly depict the state of the Android ecosystem... Nothing to see here.

cageface5• 14 years ago

The problem is that a lot of Android devices that claim to support these specs do so in buggy and inconsistent ways. GL shaders, for instance, sometimes have to be tweaked for individual devices.

daeken• 14 years ago

GL shaders have to be tweaked on every platform, and every device. The only thing that's consistent about them is that they're inconsistent everywhere. For example, certain drivers will reject shaders using integer literals where floats are expected, others won't; different GPUs will also behave different with respect to precision, or with how they handle a NaN in math.

Zigurd2• 14 years ago

That's GPU "fragmentation." You have multiple hardware/firmware/driver implementations of OpenGL. Unless you prescribe a GPU and software stack, you will always find things that slip past compatibility tests.

wink• 14 years ago

I disagree wholeheartedly, this is one of the least biased articles on iOS vs Android I have ever read.

And while I have yet to experience a single app that's not working on my not exactly new Desire Z with stock ROM (2.3.3?) apart from some games that are tabler-only), I do agree on the problem part.

The happy users won't all rate, but the unhappy ones are usually quick to downrate. A frustration I can understand as someone who used a HTC Tattoo with 1.6 for a while.

huggyface5• 14 years ago

Do you normally get your iOS vs Android articles from Daring Fireball or something? How this one can compare favorably is disturbing.

This article is terrible.

sunsu• 14 years ago

I agree with what you're saying...mostly. However, there IS a problem with devices that ONLY meet the requirements in buggy ways due to manufacturer alterations/additions. Its silly to ignore this problem and claim it doesn't exist.

huggyface5• 14 years ago

Who claims it doesn't exist? I think people are rightly saying that it is hardly the hysterical disaster that some -- for self-serving reasons -- try to present it as.

Android has compatibility tests, and they keep growing in scope and value. OpenGL ES 2.0, for instance, demands certain givens that some devices don't actually meet -- those devices should be removed from OpenGL ES 2.0 compatibility (which, as a manifest directive, would eliminate most games from being available).

sehugg• 14 years ago

Our experience supporting both iOS and Android versions of our app for 18 months (>1M daily users) is that Android users are much less satisfied. We are twice as likely to get a support request from an Android user and those requests tend to be more complex (and qualitatively more grumpy).

For example, take push notifications. C2DM only works on 2.2 devices with a logged-in Google account, so you need a fall back push mechanism. Even with C2DM you must struggle with various challenges surrounding power management and wifi sleep. In comparison, APNS just works.

Also, Android aggressively deprecates. With ICS there's a brand new Fragments API, which to be sure has a backward compatibility library, but now you are faced with the choice of rewriting your app to fit the new UI style (and potentially confusing existing users), limping along with the old Android styles, or supporting both and making your life miserable. Hey, and don't forget landscape mode and multiple aspect ratios!

I could go on, but I'm getting negative.

Tomis• 14 years ago

This very "hard" problem was solved long time ago by releasing your product along with a free demo (or shareware, or whatever). As a developer you simply have to make sure your product works on the most popular platforms, or whatever kind of platforms you want. Before the user buys he tries it, so there will be less complaints that the app does not work for them. Hardware and software will always be fragmented in a free market, and that's ok.

Zigurd2• 14 years ago

The first sign of trouble is:

" A previously (very) successful game on iOS, it was brought over to Android in order to take advantage of the huge number of devices that run the OS."

Right. A game with graphical assets designed for a couple of fixed screen sizes and resolutions is going to have problems on a system that forces developers to handle multiple screen dimensions and resolutions.

Shocked. I'm shocked.

The one thing Android "fragmentation" (meaning whatever it means in which ever context) hasn't caused for applications that were developed for Android is compatibility problems. Android apps are remarkably compatible on hardware that they were never tested on.

There is plenty to hate about OEMs' craplets and "enhancements" - which comprise the more commonly held definition of "fragmentation" - but they have had very little effect on application compatibility.

The shocking toll of hardware and software fragmentation on Android development

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