Android No Longer Fragmented | Hacker News Reader

Android No Longer Fragmented

apteligent.com

19 pointsandrewmlevy5 comments

To be clear, there is still fragmentation among devices, this shows that 93% of usage occurs on 3 operating systems vs on iOS where 2 operating systems have 97% of usage. The gap has closed significantly.

If you're going to include 2 OSes for iOS because it includes iOS 8 at <8%, then you have to include Jelly Bean at 7-8% as well, which means its 4 Android verions vs. 2 iOS versions.

If you exclude Jelly Bean, then excluding iOS 8, it's just 3 Android vs. 1 iOS.

I'm basing this on their charts on their pages for both Android and iOS.

The OS version doesn't matter as much here. There is a huge gap in API functionality betwen 2.3.x and >4.x That's the only thing that matters for a developer as the official Android support libraries hide most of the remaining >4.x API differences.

2.3 no longer matters. Nobody uses it anymore. With a few exceptions (maybe it makes sense for facebook with its army of devs to still target it), all the devs I know only have a legacy apk (no longer developed, just barely maintained) for their few 2.x users.

The popular minSdk at the moment is 16 (4.1) . This gives a nice common API, the biggest roadbump in most cases is that you have to handle pre and post lollipop cases : with/without transitions, ripples, etc, ... It is nothing compared to having to handle 2.x devices though .. the API were pretty primitive and the hardware extremely poor.. you can't develop a 2016 app and target these devices.

Of course there are exceptions. For a camera app, the Camera2 API added in lollipop might be crucial.

In most cases, the support lib does hide most of the API differences.

Many new libs are also provided by Google directly unbundled from the SDK, such as the design lib, RecyclerView or ConstraintLayout.

Unlike iOS you don't need to update your OS to get updates in Android. And iOS leaves many of he new features on older devices anyway. So the Android fragmentation although a problem is not as a big a problem that it is made out to be. Though I wish Samsung would start using its power and it does have some with the carriers to stop them from putting in their bloat as system apps. And it should start producing world phones instead of the hundred models they have for each carrier and country.

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