Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

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>fragmentation issues (majority still on Android 2.x)

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html and no, fragmentation's not an issue for anyone with the Play Store and the compatibility kit (and maybe sherlock).

I mean, are you not aware of Firefox OS which bootstrap(ed/s) itself on top of Android? Or that Ubuntu for Phones is coming out with phones to support it?

Or of the Nexus program? Or the pseudo-Nexus program with devices with unlocked bootloaders.

OH and webOS still exists, and is open source and runs on some Android devices.

What more do you want, sounds like your needs are being met. Take the android kernel and write a new UI. Then you can run it on one of the what, hundred different devices that CM supports?

>They could add C, C++, Golang, Java, C#, even ObjC to the mix this way.

lol, you think writing and supporting all of the Android APIs for all of those languages is feasible? Or you want some kind of bindings or what exactly?

>Carriers can add apps etc but there's no reason they have to adjust the base OS, and both should negotiate with Google for inclusion of new drivers

and you don't seem to actually know who controls the distribution of the drivers

Thanks for the link to up to date stats, so 'majority' is no longer correct according to those graphs, that was misleading. However the fragmentation picture still isn't pretty, even if improving - more than 30% are still on Android 2.x. This compares really badly with iOS where > 90% are on the latest and < 1% on 2 versions behind, so that's one area I really feel Android is lagging Apple on - mostly because of their more open nature, customisation, and the upgrades not going through google exclusively.

Ubuntu OS looks interesting but has no traction right now, I'll be keeping an eye on that though. I'm afraid WebOS is dead at the moment - choice of which platforms to target is more political than technical unfortunately, which is why it'd be great to see Google pushing a more open system which lets people use any language they want for development. They have enough clout to make that happen and not many do. I'm aware it's very unlikely as I said in the post above - There's no chance they'll do this for their current API, so they'd need to have a radical rethink of just what a mobile OS should provide.

Please don't take this as some sort of attack on Google or Android.

What more do you want, sounds like your needs are being met. Take the android kernel and write a new UI. Then you can run it on one of the what, hundred different devices that CM supports?

That is of course a huge amount of work for one person and likely doomed to failure. To be clear that I'm not blaming Google or demanding that they change, just agreeing with the OP that I'd like to see more options, but pointing out that that requires a fundamental rethink of the entanglement between UI and API. I've written a few iOS apps which use HTML views extensively and make little use of the UI toolkits using urls etc to pass actions and move screen, so I'm well aware this is possible using the current system, but it's currently a pain to try to use another language as your core language for an app.

Yeah, but what's it matter? Those people buy cheap Android phones. There are several options for up to date Android phones that are either Nexus, I mean, many of them if you're a GSM user. And many more if you want to use AOSP or CyanogenMod.

And devs get backporting of most apis via the Play Store so it's not like fragmentation is an issue very often at all.

The hardware is out there. The software is out there. You could port Firefox OS to the SGS4, you would have basically /everything/ on your checklist, and you can buy a 100% unlocked GSM SGS4 from Google and put Firefox OS, or port webOS, or whatever OS you want.

Are you simply lamenting that you can't walk into a store and buy that combo? I guess I don't care when I can follow the steps to do it myself (of course, now I'm starting to download stuff to play around with porting Firefox OS to my SGS4)

>requires a fundamental rethink of the entanglement between UI and API

Heh, I actually know of a platform that allows you to write web apps and from them invoke native code that conforms to their spec. And their vision is to have that platform spread across all device sizes. Do you know who it is? :)

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012/The...

Sadly, non-free. But yes, you can write projections for your own language. I've thought it would be cool to try to write one for Go.

It's more that I'm lamenting that as a mobile app developer for commercial clients I am forced to use the platforms which have traction, which leaves me with the unenviable choice of iOS or Android, both of which have significant warts, and neither of which leave much choice for experimentation in languages for writing apps or UIs.

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