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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry you're wrong, different screen-sizes (and resolutions) are NOT market fragmentation. It's not hard to handle them and we've been writing phone and tablet apps for years now, so that's a solved problem.

API/Platform fragmentation is the big problem. Supporting multiple APIs and gracefully degrading to older versions is much harder than being able to scale your UI. Apple has been pretty good with keeping customers devices as current as possible. Android, not so much.

>Many devs will ignore the DPI differences between the iPad and the iPad mini

That's because iOS-only developers were spoiled and got lazy. If your app breaks because now it has to work with a slightly different aspect ratio, or doesn't take advantage of a higer DPI screen, that's your failing.

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> API/Platform fragmentation is the big problem. Supporting multiple APIs and gracefully degrading to older versions is much harder than being able to scale your UI. Apple has been pretty good with keeping customers devices as current as possible. Android, not so much.

This is highly dependent on which kind of APIs you are interacting with. Most API families are part of Google Play Services now which means they are generally available back to 2.3. Framework API differences between platforms are generally small and haven't been much trouble to work with, although some types of hardware interaction changed significantly between some platform levels (e.g. audio).

> I'm sorry you're wrong, different screen-sizes (and resolutions) are NOT market fragmentation. It's not hard to handle them and we've been writing phone and tablet apps for years now, so that's a solved problem.

Yes it is fragmentation. Just because it is "solved", doesn't mean it doesn't create extra work, extra bugs, and from a test matrix perspective, more compromises.

Yes, it would be much better if everyone used one aspect ratio, one dpi, one device - but this is something you just deal with, if you're building a native app, not complain about it, or even expect that screen-sizes will forever be constant (which is what the OP suggested). It's like if web developers complained that their job is more difficult because they have to support users resizing their browser window. Strictly true, but insane.

Again, iOS developers got spoiled by not having to deal with this stuff for the last few years so maybe it seems like it's a big deal. The reality is, once you stop expecting a specific screen properties, it really isn't that big of a deal. It's just reality.

And no, it's not fragmentation. There is absolutely no reason to freeze out certain users because of their screen-size, or not provide certain features.

Calm down silly-generalization-man. This my surprise you but "iOS developers" aren't a monolith, aren't spoiled, and most have developed for other environments as well. There are more sizes to develop and test for. What was one is now more than one. Fragmentation.

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