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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

That's like saying 91% of the Windows market is 3 major versions, XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

2.x and 4.x are very different beasts.

Yes, it's exactly like saying that. Windows has several years between each version and each version still has like 30-40% each, so it's quite fragmented, too.

It is fragmented. But not in the developer sense.

Microsoft has always been quite good in backporting their developer libraries. So even you did have users on XP you could simply bundle these with your app e.g. .Net, DirectX.

Google may have to look at doing something similar for 2.3 users in particular.

You mean like http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.ht... ?

They are, with the Android Support Library: http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.ht...

It provides support for features from Android 3.0 (namely fragments) for all versions down to 1.6. IMO it's essential for Android development.

The platform fragmentation is still fairly poor for game development, even with the support libraries.

> [Windows] is fragmented. But not in the developer sense.

We develop windows applications and have to support XP and up. We certainly notice fragmentation "in the developer sense".

To give some examples, we can't use true filesystem transactions[1] or the ribbon UI[2]. These aren't available as "backported developer libraries". Sometimes we run into bugs[3] which were never fixed in earlier versions.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd37...

[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/617253/is-anyone-successf...

Yea there is big differences between XP and Vista in particular.

Microsoft has been good at backporting their developer libraries? And we are talking about phone right? So...Windows Phone 7 (silverlight) to 8 (WinRT), or even from Windows Mobile 6.5 (WinForms, OpenGL) to Windows Phone 7 (Silverlight) . How much backporting was/is being done?

No, they're talking about the desktop OS. Look about 2 or 3 levels up and you'll see the context is fragmentation between XP, Vista, and 7.

Right, but the original topic was about phone and Microsoft's great back porting reputation just hasn't shown up there. There is something hard about the problem and none of the major players are taking that approach (Apple doesn't backport, just supports old hardware with new versions until it unsupports them).

Downvote for disagreeing. Classy.

You're obviously not a Windows or Android developer :)

Backported to XP APIs have always been limited and just building software for XP is becoming increasingly difficult (probably as it should be, but the reality is that there are a lot of XP machines still out there), whereas building for both Android 2.3 and 3.0 is laughably simple. You lose out on some APIs, but most of the best stuff is in the support libraries. The "fragmentation" for OS updates (IMO) is really only a serious negative for the end user not getting new stuff, bug fixes, and security updates, not a real negative for developers (yet).

The bigger fragmentation problem for developers is different hardware and different drivers, but OS updates would not generally help with that since the vendors are probably worse with fixing driver bugs than they are with updating their phones (and that "fragmentation" is rather overblown, in any case).

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