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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Apple is losing its advantage over Android regarding market fragmentation.

Android has 5000 devices, differing OS versions (half of the devices out there use a 2 to 3 year old OS), and differing hardware capabilities (including different qualities in stuff like sensors, some of them even being nearly useless).

And Apple is losing to that because it has "8 different" screens?

For one, you can support most of them (all iPads for example) with the exact same code plus 2 sets of bitmap assets: normal and 2x.

As for the iPhones, they transitioned without a hitch to 5 taller display, and the same will happen to 6/6+.

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differing OS versions (half of the devices out there use a 2 to 3 year old OS)

That stat is pretty out of date by now. Android <= 2 now only accounts for 12% of devices, and most app devs aren't targeting it any more.

And Android might have 5000 devices, but it doesn't have 5000 screen sizes. Still more than Apple has, but hardly 4992 more.

http://www.androidheadlines.com/2014/09/androids-kitkat-clos...

Half of all devices use API16 or older (4.1) [0], which is now two years old, so your parent post was still accurate.

Of course, operating system fragmentation has become less of an issue generally since ICS/JB became dominant.

[0] https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html?ut...

Indeed. For the modern Android dev, there aren't that many aspect ratios that you really need to support.

Most modern phones are 16:9 (720, 960, 1080). There are still a few stragglers (Motorola in particular), but they're becoming a thing of the past.

You basically have three aspect ratios to worry about right now: 16:9, 5:3, and Motorola's 427:240.

With iOS, you have 3:2, 4:3, 71:40 (iPhone 5), and now these new iPhone 6 internal aspect ratios that get hardware resampled.

Actually 71/40 and "these new iPhone 6 internal aspect ratios" are just the same thing.

So, it all boils down to: 4:3 (all iPads) and 1.177 (5, 5S, 5C, 6, 6+).

3:2 is just a legacy ratio that will go away going forward as the 4S gets older. It's not a ratio they have produced iPhones with for several years now.

Also, Android's layout system is light years ahead of iOS's AutoLayout and Size Classes.

Testing for 5000 devices isn't much different from testing for 8 devices. At some point you stop writing and testing for every configuration separately, and start grouping them, pretty much as you describe with one code and 3-5 sets of assets (counting both bitmaps and layouts).

Not to mention Bluetooth support: 4.0 wasn't officially supported until Android 4.4 (IIRC), and you had to rely on OEM-specific libraries for Bluetooth beforehand.

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