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Comment by FigBug | Hacker News Reader

It's not. Except Windows has 95% of the market and the Mac had 5% of the market. So even though it's easier and cheaper to support a Mac app, the market is so much smaller it's still not really worth it.

Compare to mobile where iOS market place was leading, it didn't make a lot of sense to spend more effort on the smaller market.

Now the Android market is about equal, you are still spending more effort to make the same money.

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> Except Windows has 95% of the market and the Mac had 5% of the market.

Except you are forgetting, screen resolution, processor speed, graphics card, sound card, co-processor, printer type, scanner type, microphone, webcam, harddisk, network card, modem, ...

Way back in the day it was pretty common for people to swap out pieces of a system (not too much today except for gamers).

Your system needs a bigger screen? Get a bigger monitor and/or graphics card. Need a faster modem? Buy one. Need a camera? Add it.

Go upgrade the graphics chip in your Android 2.3 handset. Oh wait...

That doesn't have anything to do with the complaint about Android's fragmentation.

you're pointing out 'fragmentation' in the windows market because of all the varying hardware, and it seemed you were saying it was equivalent to the android world. it's not, because you generally could change hardware on a windows system, but not on an android device.

Quite the contrary.

I am pointing out that fragmentation in the COMPUTER HARDWARE and SOFTWARE is normal and exists since computers are among us. Windows market is a tiny spot of the COMPUTER HARDWARE and SOFTWARE around the world.

Any good developer learns to deal with it instead of writing posts whining about it.

Plus iOS which is oversold as not being fragmented has different set of API support depending on iOS/handset/tablet pair set.

But... it wasn't ('a tiny spot') at the time. And good developers didn't 'deal with it' so much as people simply upgraded their hardware - computer stores routinely upgraded people's modems, graphics cards, sound cards, monitors, etc. Of course, some software would run with lower quality hardware, or try to run without certain features, but people mostly upgraded components (or entire systems) to be able to run newer software. We do that today somewhat - buying new systems - but no one reasonably tries to upgrade the CPU in their android smartphone - they just get a new one.

We're either talking past each other or have a vastly different sense of the issue we're talking about (or both).

> We're either talking past each other or have a vastly different sense of the issue we're talking about (or both).

My point is that developers always had zero control over the hardware/software configuration of the systems being targeted, it has nothing to do with the ability to upgrade.

Lets say one is coding an application for Amigas. There are 500, 600, 1000, 1200, .... series.

There is zero control over which type of monitor/TV and external devices the respective users have attached to their systems.

There is no concept of device drivers as of today systems, most need to be provided by the application writers themselves.

Again, zero to do with upgrade capability rather with the diversity of the installed base.

Well, no, Android market share is not equal to iPhone. It's much, much more.

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