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Comment by svdree | Hacker News Reader

Android fragmentation is real, but screen sizes are not part of the issue. The whole system is built around the idea of supporting different screen sizes, and provides you with the tools you need to handle them.

The real fragmentation is in hardware support (don't get me started on OpenGL-ES drivers) and manufacturers that modify the OS in crazy ways. It's quite frustrating to receive crash reports with stack traces showing a crash originating in some manufacturers custom code, with no way of knowing what went wrong.

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My favorite Android app is Moves. Moves does not work on Samsung Galaxy Note II, thanks to one of many tweaks Samsung has done to Android. This phone is one of the most popular Android phones in the world and it's running a very recent version of Android. I find this completely unacceptable.

A lot of games and certain apps also list "compatible devices" in their Play Store description area. Some developers even warn users not to pay for and download the app if their phone is not supported.

Android fragmentation is unfortunately very real.

This is true but mostly an issue for games. With multiple OEMs and multiple sources of GPUs and drivers - significantly more than for PCs, the only solution is for driver quality to improve. History suggests not holding one's breath.

For the wild west of Android html5 hybrid development, fragmentation is a huge problem. Different manufacturers roll different implementations that behave differently. Javascript event propagation varied and broke my app on my last HTML5 project. Luckily, the chrome view will be the default webview from KitKat onwards, but it will take at least two years for 4.4+ to become ubiquitous.

This! I feel your pain. I'm on the same boat, trying to support mobile HTML5 on Android.

To be fair, iOS has it's own issues with HTML5 development.

I think iOS' HTML5 issues (webview throttling) are self induced though. Apple has a vested interest in developers learning, and being locked into their proprietary ecosystem.

A bunch of devs building slick HTML5 apps would go against this.

It was pretty stupid of them to use the new llvm-based javascript JIT for webviews in iOS 8, then...

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