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Comment by credo | Hacker News Reader

>>This is how you beat software fragmentation.

This does help defragment Android from a Google (developed) app perspective.

However, it doesn't do anything for 3rd-party developers. It doesn't do anything for regular consumers who wish to upgrade their 2.3.3 phones or 4.1 phones to the latest version of Android. So Google has a long way to go before they really defragment Android.

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What? It absolutely helps 3rd party app developers. Need a new and better video/gps/network/etc.. api? Right now you stuck depending on a new OS Version. if they start tying api's to play store updates, as they have with things like geolocation/gps functions, they worrying which OS and about fragmentation mostly goes away for 3rd party developers of apps.

How is Play going to update the kernel without the OEM's involvement?

Some software improvements and new libraries will be available, and that's a plus for users. But this is still a far distance from REAL OS updates. I'd worry this disincentives OEMs to do real updates.

Sure certain very low level items are going to be difficult to update outside of the kernel. Let's use video as an example, it's something I'm really familiar with. At the Kernel android provides an OEM version of the stagefright lib and the actual video drivers, those would be hard to update outside of the kernel. What the play store can easily update is newer and better API's to those low level lib's. Right now those encoder/decoder API's were new in OS version 4.1 ( I think 4 something, just woke up :) ) but using the google play updates new and better API's could be rolled out at anytime.

I'm not sure about the extent of the 'mostly' part. You still have the huge differences in CPU speed, GPU capabilities, screen sizes and amount of memory to cater with.

That 5 year old phone may have the latest Play Services, but what good is that if that leaves only 10 kilobytes of RAM for your app?

You have the same problem with, for example, iOS devices though - there are games out there that don't run on older devices even though they're all nominally running the same OS because the older devices are too slow.

I think that's the "acceptable" end of fragmentation. Of course technology will get better, and old devices will be left behind. It doesn't matter what platform you are on.

That's a different issue. This is about Software fragmentation. Hardware fragmentation is alot harder to solve IMO.

I feel like most people aren't version number junkies, and as long as their phone does all (or most) of the same things that neighbour Jones' Nexus phone does they'll be happy.

The whole point of it is to help 3rd party developers with the API's, so they homogenize the API's through Play Services.

However, you're right about the user part. It will help the users slightly, better apps with latest API's will come along, but the users still won't get the latest features of the OS unless the phone is upgraded to the latest version.

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