Comment by wklauss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wklauss | Hacker News Reader

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There are tradeoffs in every approach and there are steps Google could have taken to make the situation better without mimicking the controlled experience and uniformity of iOS. Unfortunately at this point this is pretty much how it's going to be.

So yeah, it's a "pick your poison" kind of world and theres no easy way out. You deal with it and hope for the best. But that doesn't mean it's not worth pointing it out or that is not a problem for the Android ecosystem in the long run.

> iOS and Windows are fragmenting the market for me. They are not compatible with Android...

By that same logic Android is fragmenting it too.

> When speaking in iOS terms, you can say that 90% of all Android devices get updated once per months or so, when another update for Gmail, Google Voice Search or GCM arrived.

No, as a developer having users in different versions of Android affects the things your app can do. What APIs does it have access to and how. I don't care if the user thinks he's updated because their gmail app looks new. I care that my app needs more hours of coding to make sure it does the same on Android 2.3 than on 4.1.

> ... You can make your app run Holo no matter what Android version is installed on your customer's device.

There are some iOS developers that follow this same route. A lot of services / functions in iOS are not mandatory, you can use your own versions of it if you want to devote the time and skill to rewrite them. Loren Brichter comes to mind as a good example of this. Developers use the Apple route because it's easy and takes out a lot of the workload.

"By that same logic Android is fragmenting it too."

How? Android is an open cross platform technology for building operating systems that are app-compatible with each other. How is that fragmenting?

"No, as a developer having users in different versions of Android affects the things your app can do."

This is correct, but not in the sense that an older version of an operating system (in the iOS sense of the word) would. New developer features of ios7 are a new user interface, better location services, background push notifications etc. All of these things are available on android-based systems as well, but none of these things depend on the Android version.

I admit that there are also APIs that are part of Android, and therefore only available in newer versions. And so an OS that is based on Android 4.0 can not run every app that is made for an OS based on Android 4.3.

But if you need to target all 800 devices that your customers use in the end, the iPhone turns out to be much different from an Android 4.0 device than Android 4.3. And that's the point: You need to develop for all these devices anyway. So think about effort per device, not effort per platform.

"How?"

If you're going to say introducing a new OS is fragmenting the market than Android fits that definition as well as any other. If you're going to claim Android gets a free pass because Calvinball well we might as well close the thread.

please re-read my post. My point is that Android is not a new operating system in the sense the word is used today. It is a foundation on which you build operating systems that are compatible to another. Apple could build iOS on top of Android, but you cannot build Android on top of iOS.

Since Android was first released in 2008, Many vendors have replaced their incompatible OS with another one based on Android.

> How? Android is an open cross platform technology for building operating systems that are app-compatible with each other. How is that fragmenting?

Situation: there are two operating systems, A and B. Someone who wants to target all the devices on the market has to write two apps, one for A, one for B. This is fragmentation.

Introducing a third operating system, C, means that someone who wants to target all the devices on the market now has to write three apps: one for A, one for B, one for C. This is, arguably, more fragmentation, since you have more apps to write.

Does it really matter what A, B and C are actually called? Android is the latest entry to the mobile operating systems market (save for ghosts like WebOS). If anything, it was one of the driving factors of fragmentation.

> But if you need to target all 800 devices that your customers use in the end, the iPhone turns out to be much different from an Android 4.0 device than Android 4.3.

How? IIRC, there's nothing stopping you from developing with an older API if you want, just like on Android. Sure, you can't use the new and fancy features, just like you can't use them on Android, either...

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