Devs Grapple With 100+ Versions of Android 386
Barence writes "The scale of the challenge facing Android developers has been laid bare by Twitter client TweetDeck. During beta testing of its new software, TweetDeck encountered more than 36,000 testers using an enormous pool of 244 different handsets. Not only was hardware for the platform fragmented, but Tweetdeck had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android, highlighting just how muddled the market is for the open-source platform. The splintering of Android is making life difficult for app developers. 'It's not particularly harder to develop for Android over iPhone (from a programming standpoint),' said Christopher Pabon, a developer who writes apps for both the iPhone and Android platforms. 'Except when it comes to final quality assurance and testing. Then it can be a nightmare (a manageable nightmare, mind you).'"
Question (Score:3, Insightful)
sounds to me like android is guilty of (Score:3, Insightful)
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100+ versions? To make it easier they should just program to 99.99999999999.....+ versions.
Re:sounds to me like that you are (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think so. The main issue seems to be that of Android residing on multiple dissimilar handsets, the OS changes this necessitates, and the programming challenges to support same. Of course that's going to be tougher to program for than a closed single hardware platform. The upside is that an application that runs on a majority of Android handsets is more likely to be purchased on a majority of Android handsets.
My Android handset has a larger than average screen resolution, and a few widgets don't play nice with it. I'd rather have the hardware choice and deal with the small incompatibilities than have one company tell me to take their phone and love it.
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I don't think so.
The 'success' of Android is good for everyone (several strong competitors in the smartphone OS market push development and innovation) but too many versions and handsets at this young age of Android make the future easy to predict: it will only get worse.
There is going to be a small industry built simply to provide testing for Android devices until either a) Android flavors congeal or b) developers start focusing on specific segments of the Android market.
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This is a problem, and one of the things that risks ruining Android's "openness" - it's open to the carriers, who have the money & staff to spend on locking your device down just the way they like it. It's open for the carriers, not the *vast majority* of consumers, who will take what the carriers offer, and form their impression based on that.
In many ways, the iOS vs. Android 'battle' isn't really a battle between Google & Apple, it's a battle between Apple's "the phone maker dictates the feature
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iOS is a locked down OS on locked down hardware. Of course it's not going to have the same issues.
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a basic hardware spec (number of buttons etc) laid out by the OHSA, you have processors of varying speeds and some have keyboards and better GPUs. The market can already limit what you see based on these requirements. App developers just need to think about the spec they want vs the number of handsets of that spec in the market. Hell, if your app's good enough, it'll drive the spec of the handset. It's just like what they have to do in the world of PC app development, made easier due to the rapid churn of handset specs as they get steadily faster and cheaper.
Android's not doing at all badly compared to Apple's iOS, is it?
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
So it means that you have a lower return on investment, given that your testing costs are higher.
Hell, if your app's good enough, it'll drive the spec of the handset.
This is both irrelevant and wishful thinking. App popularity does not change the amount of testing required to get it popular in the first place, nor would popularity reduce the number of configurations you must test against even were the spec to change.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I assume that when you develop a game for the desktop, you develop it for the latest Windows version with some care over portability to the version prior to that and that's it.
You'd ignore the windows XP market?
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As far as I'm concerned, there want anything between XP and 7. Vista doesn't count.
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Then 1.5 doesn't count since it's share is less than that of Vista (sitting at 13%)
It's not about share. Anyone that is running Vista can upgrade to Windows 7, as it's actually lighter than Vista. There are still Android devices out there with no way to upgrade because their providers don't offer a supported upgrade path.
Even then, though, as the article noted, there seem to be over 100 different versions of the OS. Every carrier makes their own version of each release, on top of the versions people install on their own into Windows Mobile phones. All with differences that make them sli
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No. Mac developers tend to develop for the latest OS X version only
Nonsense. But considering the source, ignorance is to be expected. I know of no software that doesn't run on Leopard (10.5) as well as Snow Leopard (10.6). I'm sure there must be some examples, but they aren't even remotely common, let alone the norm.
which is why owning a slightly old Mac is such a frustrating experience
Snow Leopard runs on every Intel Mac, which is to say every new Mac since around 2006. Leopard runs on PPC Macs even older still. Every so often there is a piece of software that is Intel-only, although that's not terribly common.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you need to raise the price of your app....nothing is stopping you. If you think it's worth that much.....
Nothing, except for all the people that bitch if an app is even $4.99.
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
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It is different, at least for Windows and OS X, in that the OS is relatively unified under 4 or 5 variants (OS X 10.5-10.6) and Windows XP - Win7), whereas under Android, they have hundreds of different hardware variations (albeit the same basic chips for the most part), in additional to various Android OS flavors on top of each of those hundreds of hardware variations. It's probably more akin to a different Linux distro for each handset, although that may be a bit of a stretch.
Personally I think software f
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It's not different than developing for any other phone... and that's why so few people used non-preinstalled apps on their phone before the iPhone. Look at Symbian, it's a clusterfuck of versions, headsets and implementations. My last Symbian phone would crash if I tried to used T9 in my favorite IRC app and GMail would just quit after 2-3 emails. Screw that.
It is completely different than developing for a PC because computers are viewed by consumers as platforms while phones are viewed as tools/electronic
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So how is this different to developing games/apps for the desktop (or, hell, laptop, tablet, netbook variants thereof), or every other phone OS other than iOS to date? Is this really a surprise to these people? If so they only have themselves to blame for going into the market blindly, as I'd have thought this would be self evident to anyone developing for an OS that's deployed to multiple hardware platforms.
You are almost right. For the most part, there are only 3 OS versions you can expect desktop users to be running (WinXP, Win7-32 and Win7-64.) Then comes the huge array of hardware differences, though.
But as I said, you are almost right. Android is like Windows. iPhone is like the XBox or PS3. Develop a game for an XBox or PS3 and you are sure it will run on all of them. The iPhone has a tiny level of feature fragmentation that is not as different as seeing XBoxes with or without hard drive. Actually, the
Cost/Benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
So it means that you have a lower return on investment, given that your testing costs are higher.
Right - this should be a simple cost/benefit analysis.
"I want access to these additional six million customers and it's going to cost me an additional $4600 per year to test for them. Worth it or not?"
Sure, 'free' would be lovely, in some kind of dream world. But "I want to have these customers and I don't want to bother testing for them," just smacks of greed and/or stupidity. Perhaps the smart developers will seek to stand out by letting people know they've actually tested their software on the device the potential customer owns.
Is there some sort of contractual obligation that precludes the developers from saying, "sorry, we haven't tested our app on this $130 non-flashable off-brand 7-inch Android tablet that you got from the local bedding supply store on clearance?"
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p>"I want access to these additional six million customers and it's going to cost me an additional $4600 per year to test for them. Worth it or not?"
That's great until your customers find out you're using a sweatshop of six year olds to test your apps ...
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Agreed. $4600 will pay for the salary, benefits, and expenses of one tester for maybe 1/2 a month...salary, rent, equipment, insurance, taxes, benefits, etc...Labor isn't cheap.
One tester for 1/2 a month might get your app tested on two platform variants, depending on how complex (or not) your app is. There are now 100 platform variants... so getting enough testers, equipment, etc. for all variants of android can cost $230,000.
That is, of course, if you are paying testers directly. If you do a public bet
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Writing software is more and more like buying a very expensive lottery ticket. Most app developers end up working for pennies on the dollar.
"But the picture starts out bleak. The average developer gets to pocket a mere $3,050 per year, and this is still considered 'above typically successful', and the most typical developer earns less than that per year."
Software scales very, very, very well; but our price point expectations are set by the biggest, most successful companies. If you are a top-of-the-charts
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We have thousands of applications and libraries on Linux. They not only work across different versions of the OS, most of them work across different versions AND different architecture
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed.
I don't see how it can be an issue. Look how prolific development is for windows is, you have no guarantee what the hardware is yet that didn't seem to hinder development for Windows esp if you compare Windows to Apple.
Re:So? (Score:4, Funny)
Did you really just defend Windows? ... on Slashdot?
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Thanks yes I know of DirectX and I remember the days of DOS and picking out your sound card and you graphics card (even before 3d acceleration) joystick etc and even with that there were still a boat load of games both put out by big companies and some guy in his garage. You had to pick what you would and would not support and most all games would default to bare bones if needed, like internal speaker and generic EGA or VGA display and keyboard control.
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Oh and sorry to double reply but I just noticed the Moraffware example. I loved dungeons of the Unforgiven. Good memories.
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App developers just need to think about the spec they want vs the number of handsets of that spec in the market.
This translates to: "in the fragmented Android market, you need to choose your fragment".
Or (if disparaging Engadget despite fundamentally agreeing with them makes you squeamish) perhaps this translation: "There is no such thing as the Android market, there is the Droid market, the Galaxy S market, the Desire market, etc."
How easy is it to get information about all the shards of the Android market and so make a decision about what to target? All the pie charts I've seen have wedges that just say "Android" o
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're missing a key point.
Back in the early days of DOS, the OS was relatively stable but the hardware on which it ran was all over the map. We wanted to port Crystal Quest from the Mac to the PC but punted when we saw that we had no way of knowing how many PCs there were that had both a mouse, sound hardware and a video card that could handle bitmap video. All of those features were standard on a Mac but were customizations on a PC. It wasn't until Windows 95 came out that Microsoft started dictating minimum hardware specs that all machines had to have and Microsoft wouldn't let the manufacturer say the PC could run Windows 95 until Microsoft had QA'd the box.
Android is still in the DOS days. Once Google gets around to learning the same lesson Microsoft learned (albeit slowly) and develops a QA test suite that they administer, the problem will only get worse.
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DOS well and truly *was* a crap gaming platform, chum. Since you've got your rose-colored glasses on, let's look back:
Segmented memory architecture (640K conventional RAM, 64K in the high-memory-area, and *five* different ways of accessing anything past 1MB:
* Direct, using INT15 in the BIOS
* Expanded memory, whose spec had two major versions
* Extended memory (XMS)
* DOS Protected Mode Interface
* Virtual Control Program Interface
In ad
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You have a basic hardware spec (number of buttons etc) laid out by the OHSA, you have processors of varying speeds and some have keyboards and better GPUs. The market can already limit what you see based on these requirements.
Your solution is to sell to less people ? Pissing off potential customers who bought into the Android hype but didn't spend enough money on their handset, brilliant bit of marketing there.
Hell, if your app's good enough, it'll drive the spec of the handset. It's just like what they have to do in the world of PC app development, made easier due to the rapid churn of handset specs as they get steadily faster and cheaper.
Aaand we're back in PC land : "don't worry people will just buy the hardware to accommodate us, the developer." I thought that attitude died along with PC gaming and Windows Vista.
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If the 'you can't give stuff away and make a profit' argument held in reality Google would be bankrupt instead of one of the most profitable companies in the world. That 'free' OS? First and foremost it ships by default with a ton of Google apps installed, all of which generate advertising revenue and market information that Google uses to generate it's profit. Secondly, since a ridiculously large majority of people still use Google for their search it stands to reason that the more connected people are
The more things change... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The more things change... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's interesting to me that this is the same problem facing PC's, where there are hundreds of different versions of open source OSes vs. Windows/OSX.
I believe you put Windows on the wrong side of that equation. The controlled platform is OSX. The wild-cards are Windows and Open Source OSes; much wider selection of hardware and much less control over OS tree / components / build.
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actually, you shouldn't put windows and open source OSes on the same side of the equation.
controlled platform = OSX
varied hardware platform, consistent software interface = Windows
varied hardware platform, varied software interfaces = OSSOS's.
the common interface is the key to successful third party developer participation.
Apple got it, then MS learned it the hard way (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple by controlling the OS and hardware out of the starting gate had it right. Microsoft learned it the hard way after years of unsupportable carrier-specific hacks of their Windows Mobile OS, culminating in a much more rigidly defined Windows Mobile 7. Phones that are difficult to upgrade and that cannot run software that runs on other similar phones hurts brand loyalty. If Google wants to retain loyal customers in the mobile market, they are going to have to consolidate these variants and force a sing
If Google wants to retain loyal customers (Score:2, Insightful)
It's too late.
I wanted an Android phone but with Motorola's iPhone-like ambitions and HTC's If-rooted-Reload-default-OS feature, I'd rather go for a poorly guarded jail (iPhone) than a WW2 concentration camp.
I tell people that Android is a failed experiment that proves that Carriers' and Manufacturers' greed will kill any open source advantages that Android could have brought.
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*You* may think Android is a failed experiment, although I'd argue that 250K Android activations a day is a success:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/10/04/google-approaching-quarter-million-android-activationsday/ [cnn.com]
Reality is somewhere between being idealistic and pragmatic. Carriers and Manufacturers may try to kill Android's advantages, but that's the beauty of Android. You can simply pick a different carrier or manufacturer. What do you do if you don't like who makes or handles the connectivity of your iPh
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I tell people that Android is a failed experiment that proves that Carriers' and Manufacturers' greed will kill any open source advantages that Android could have brought.
Then sir, you are a fool. How exactly is is a failed experiment? My phone seems to work just fine, I can find any application I want...and...I can replace my battery!
Re:If Google wants to retain loyal customers (Score:4, Informative)
and HTC's If-rooted-Reload-default-OS feature,
That's funny, my rooted Evo, which I bought a few weeks after its launch, is still rooted and I am under no obligation to run any OTA updates offered. So yeah, I enjoy being able to use my phone as a wifi hotspot paired up with my netbook, along with any other feature that requires root.
failed experiment that proves that Carriers' and Manufacturers' greed will kill any open source advantages that Android could have brought.
Exactly what advantages? How is a phone with a variety of options any better or worse than a phone without those options? The advantages I find with my phone are that I was able to choose which phone I wanted, nothing more. I don't really care that I can go and look at the code and modify it to do whatever I want. I care that I have a choice between a variety of hardware vendors and carriers. I wanted 4g speeds, and I wanted a plan that suited how I use my phone. So for my monthly price, I get unlimited data at speeds far greater than any other phone, and I can share that unlimited data with other devices. This is win.
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I think it was a HTC Droid 2 that had the If-rooted-Reload-default-OS feature.
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I've had my Android phone for three months now, and still haven't found a reason to root it. What's the point?
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http://www.intomobile.com/2010/09/20/rooted-android-passwords-plain-text/ [intomobile.com]
Re:If Google wants to retain loyal customers (Score:4, Insightful)
Even with some manufacturers locking down their phones (in futility), your analogy still seems backwards. Even on a locked Android phone, you have the ability to install any app from any source, which alone makes it more open by orders of magnitude compared to the iPhone. If you really care about a phone which you can flash with your own ROM, there is always a set of phones that are capable of that right out of the box; just buy one of those. If anything, iOS is the WW2 concentration camp, and *some* Android hardware is the poorly guarded jail.
Re:Apple got it, then MS learned it the hard way (Score:4, Insightful)
If Google wants to retain loyal customers in the mobile market, they are going to have to consolidate these variants and force a single, portable, upgradable OS like Apple and Microsoft are doing.
I disagree. One of the selling points of an Android phone is that there are many options when it comes to what kind of phone you want. Let's assume you are correct, and future versions of Android are standardized in a way that prevents hardware vendors from offering a variety of devices. If I, as the consumer, need to get a new phone, I can either time it just right so that the hardware options I desire are available the moment my carrier contract is up, or I will have to wait until such is offered.
This is such a negative selling point for any type of iThing in my book. If I had needed a new phone several months before the current gen was released, I would either have to switch to something else, purchase the same phone I had previously, or go without a phone for several months. While it's possible I might just go without, it is not possible that I would fork out money for the same device I bought a couple years ago. This leaves me with switching to another phone as the best option, which is exactly what several people I know have done as they were looking to replace their iPhones several months prior to the launch of the current model.
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Which is funny since WM7 phones aren't backwards compatible software wise.
Why More Difficult Than Desktop Apps? (Score:4, Insightful)
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every PC running Windows has a keyboard and mouse. there are cool keyboards out there with some cool shortcuts and functionality but that is handled by their drivers. the basic input is the same.
on Android you have hundreds of different devices with different input mechanisms. some have touch, some keyboard. and then there are different touch screens to support multi touch and other forms of input and different gestures. i use an iphone, but i hear there is something called swype out there that a lot of han
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Um, where to start...
The API's for accessing the touch screens, multitouch, and everything else you mentioned are all built in. There's no magic hand-waving for the N devices that you're developing for. The biggest hurdle for a developer is really supporting a variety of different screen form factors, and a well planned application can handle that well with planning and foresight. You may have to say 'if X' then do an extra step when a notable feature is absent, but you'll find that by far the majority of t
Re:Why More Difficult Than Desktop Apps? (Score:5, Insightful)
Programmers write software for a myriad of different versions of Windows running on thousands of different types of hardware without these QA issues. What is Android doing that causes this problem?
As you probably suspect... nothing. There are thousands of useful apps working on all handsets without problems. I have about 30 installed on my Nexus One, carefully read the user reviews for each on AppBrain, and there is a reason most of these have 4.5+ stars... In other words, there are programmers who can do, and programmers who can whine on their blog. What I don't understand is why Slashdot links to random whining programmer to inflate the issue of fragmentation. Actually, you're right on target with the windows analogy. There are shitty programmers whose apps suffer due to hardware/platform (win7/vista/xp) differences, and then there are apps that work fine across all versions of the OS/hw.
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The problem is real! (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, there are "thousands of Android apps working without problems" -- but that doesn't mean it was easy for everyone to get them there.
Just last week, I did updates to the apps I use on my Android phone, and I think it found 4. Of those, 2 had "reviews" of 1 star, warning people not to download them because they caused massive crashes and issues. (I believe one was the "Trivial Droid" app, which supposedly was crashing so bad for some people on the latest update, they had to pull their batteries out of
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You see, cell phones are magical.
On desktops, multiple OS versions and enormous variations in hardware aren't a significant problem. But on cell phones this an insurmountable problem that can only be solved by locking down everything possible, down to one OS, one hardware manufacturer, and one carrier if at all possible.
On desktops, a total lack of sandboxing or any filesystem security to speak of is not a significant problem as long as you have anti-virus and keep your browser up to date. But on cell phone
Re:Why More Difficult Than Desktop Apps? (Score:5, Insightful)
The way I see it, the issue is OS rev fragmentation, moreso than hardware. Imagine if Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP all came out 6 months apart, with Vista slated to launch next month and 7 in the spring, and 50% of computers shipping today had 98 installed, and no support for higher versions.
Related is the carriers' insistence on adding a layer on top of android to make it their own, which just delays the release, meaning by the time they're done the next OS version is out.
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One of the way they deal with it is to limit the scope by specifying min spec. Another way of dealing with it is to charge a lot more for a PC app than for a mobile app.
Well, TFA says that they can deal with it aswell, and anyway they did deal with it in the days of WinME and J2ME.
I guess it is still regrettable that so early in the development of Android there is already so much fragmentatio
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Windows is more internally standardized?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA [microsoft.com].
PCs were fragmented since ever (Score:2, Interesting)
I understand that platforms like consoles and the iCool stuff benefit from the unified platform, but why is this SUCH a big issue? Computers were always fragmented and no two machines were the same in my vicinity, yet still there was working software everywhere - sometimes even crossing OS-borders (playing q3 between different windows and linux versions was never a problem).
I am not a coder, so could someone explain to me why all of a sudden diversity is such a problem?
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But at least you had ONE version of the OS and the user could upgrade whenever he/she wanted.
If your Android phone came with v1.6 and you want to install Android OS v2.2, you have to wiat for the manufacture of your Android phone to publish *its* version of Android OS v2.2.
Oh, your phone is 2+ years old, too bad. The manufacturer doesn't see $$ in helping you.
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Diversity is *always* a problem, but its not an insurmountable obstacle. It means you need to run the same tests on any likely platform. The more of these platforms there are, the more of a pain it is, and of course, the more money and time it takes to do it that comes out of the bottom line.
Having said that, we've gotten rather good at testing multiple platforms in software design. Once you are actually forced to stand up a professional platform QA team, its not too difficult to scale their activities.
Mainly the five most recent releases (Score:5, Informative)
2.2, 2.1 update 1, 2.1, something called 020201 (2.0?) and 1.6 account for almost all of the users. The remainder are custom ROMs you're not really obliged to support. Not that having five major releases operating in the wild is much better, mind.
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But handset manufacturers do not distribute vanilla versions of each OS. Sometimes the OS varies between different handsets from the same manufacturer running the same OS version.
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Sure, and unless you're making a game that requires a certain minimum benchmark, or if you're trying to do VERY specific measurements using the built-in sensors, who does this affect the developer at all? The API is there, and it pretty much covers all you need in order to insulate against the hardware / OS tweaks. If you decide that you want native blobs instead of Java/Dalvik, then you're into a brand new world of fragmentation, that's why you should be very careful about deciding to make the jump into na
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And considering most of those custom ROMs are built on top of official build versions, they're almost irrelevant.
BS (Score:2, Insightful)
As an AC developer, I call BS - have you looked at the "versions" of Android they identified? "Baked Snack 1.0 Epic" or
"5.0 Welcome to Prisneyland, Fish"? Most of the versions (I dont see the numbers, but I would guess about 80%+ from the chart) are 2.2, 2.1, and 1.6.
If you have a custom android deployment on the phone, then you may have problems... but don't come whining to me about how you Baked Snack build doesn't support Angry Bird!
Re:BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:BS (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, so its like OpenGL/DirectX (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you've got to query for functionality, design to fallback in some cases for the features you work with/around, then design tests to make sure it works in the cases you design for. From that, you budget your time, allocate test machines/staff, and ballpark your costs.
Doesn't sound too unusual - the more features you implement, the more combined testing you have to do for edge cases.
It's just like with video cards and graphics programming - you design for a limited subset of possible cards, have code to query the cards capabilities, have fallback code for some cards, then test against a good range of cards. Blaming card manufacturers at large for their variety of design isn't productive - they're what makes the market you have the chance to code for.
Ryan Fenton
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Android Dev (Score:5, Interesting)
One REALLY nice thing about developing for Android was that we could have a beta period that involved 36k users. Being able to distribute the APK outside the Market was a real blessing. It's much harder to test iPhone software before submitting it to Apple.
Re:Android Dev (Score:5, Insightful)
The flip side to that is it takes a whole lot less testing to hit the targets on the iphone / ipod / ipad. In fact a couple of my apps did not require any modification when the ipad was released it just ran.
US Cellular sells naked android 2.1 (Score:3, Insightful)
I just want to thank US Cellular. They sell one phone with naked android, and one phone with HTC Sense. Both are running the Android 2.1, which is almost up to date. (Only the Nexus one and some tablets have 2.2).
This is the key, I think: ship the Google code and only the google code, and ship an up to date OS.
Many devices are still running 1.6 and some 1.5. This is unacceptable. Blackberry is no better. They sell their OS upgrades as a feature with their phones. Not OK.
--Sam
Re:US Cellular sells naked android 2.1 (Score:5, Informative)
(Only the Nexus one and some tablets have 2.2).
Wrong. Droid, Droid 2, Droid X from Motorola are all on 2.2.
HTC has several 2.2 Phones (Incredible, Evo 4G, Desire)
Your information is dated.
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There are a lot of phones other than the N1 with official releases of Android 2.2:
- Droid 1
- Droid X
- Droid 2
- HTC Incredible (and its varients)
- HTC Evo
Just to name a few...
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So it must be crap software then (Score:3, Insightful)
TweetDeck for the iPhone crashes way too often (about once a day on averahge), and for that there are only a handful of different versions. So TweetDeck for Android must be real garbage.
Wait a sec... (Score:2)
Since when were dozens of hacked ROM's "different versions of Android?"
I am just curious. (Score:4, Insightful)
As a customer: Does Fragmentation mean that i actually have a choice what i buy?
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Nope. You'll choose a phone based on the hardware, and put up with the shitty manufacturer+carrier customisations. One of the best things about the iPhone is that Apple doesn't allow carrier customisations.
Contradictory Statement (Score:2)
That's not our experience (Score:2)
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Score:3, Interesting)
You can have an organized bazaar. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Google hasn't exactly done the best job of trying to coordinate things. Google can Open Source the platform, but do like Sun did with Java - anyone can implement Java, but you can't *call* it "Java", unless you passed a conformance test that Sun had. Google should have tried something similar to Android - make it so people can't market their phone as running "Android", unless they conformed to a certain definition of what Android is.
It's too late for that now, of course, but for future releases of the OS,
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a very selfish view on the C&B analogy. I too like my cathedral-like iPhone, but I'm glad that the unwashed masses :-) are pumping up the bazaar to put pressure on the cathedral landlord to innovate and evolve (READ: hurry up and let me switch to Verizon!).
The Bigger Problem . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Missing some key information, I think (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of the highly modded posts right now seem to be missing some key information about exactly how Android is fragmented. It's not just the hardware - that can usually, but not always, be worked around in the ways they suggest. But it's also the software - every carrier and handset manufacturer likes to put their own little spin on the underlying software, and this causes more problems than one might expect.
You get scenarios where some functionality is partially implemented or simply broken on some devices but not others, so you can't rely on simply querying to see if that functionality is available. The OS will happily tell you it's working, but it won't, so you have to find ways to work around it and/or implement long lists of special cases in the code. On some devices, the way that some input elements are displayed will have forced styling that's inconsistent with the rest of the platform, which you won't learn about until you've actually tried it on that device and seen your layout get destroyed. The autocomplete functionality or keyboard input method can vary substantially from device to device, potentially impacting how one's UI flows work. The list goes on.
Limiting supported major OS versions and querying for hardware only solves part of the fragmentation problem. The fact that most every device has its own little fork of Android is more what causes the QA challenge. Since - generally speaking - one doesn't have these kinds of problems for mainstream desktop OS's, that's why people keep bringing up fragmentation of the Android platform as a major sticking point.
Re:Missing some key information, I think (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly my point. One specific example I remember from a while back had to do with telling a list view to redraw itself. For most devices, it would work without difficulty. On a certain set of devices, the exact same call would happily return without actually updating the listview, because the handset manufacturer and/or carrier thought they knew better and tinkered with the underlying functionality of the OS and subsequently broke something.
That sort of fragmentation - a million tiny undocumented forks - can't be gracefully handled by abstractions, capability querying, or API versioning. And the only way to discover that this sort of problem will occur is to actually run the software on the afflicted devices to see what breaks. *That* sort of problem is what TweetDeck is referring to when they say "more than a hundred different versions of Android", and is the sort of problem that causes people to complain about Android fragmentation.
Speaking as a potential customer (Score:3, Insightful)
As a potential customer for an Android smartphone, I have to admit that the one thing that is holding me off buy an expensive (and thus likely more profitable for its manufacturer) phone is the fragmentation issue with Android. This is a very real problem that is the source of many if not most of the problems with Windows. A fragmented platform is one that is more costly to test on. Pure and simple. I don't want to buy a $400 phone today and discover a year from now that I can't run an app that my phone should support hardware-wise, but simply doesn't work because that phone no longer supported by its developer. This is a problem that Google has to address very soon. And, no they haven't adequately addressed it yet, even though Android is selling so well.
While I don't like the "uniformity" of iPhone, testing is going to be cheaper and thus more likely to occur on that platform as opposed to Android.
But how many are relevant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, there's lots of versions of Android out there. But how many of those really matter? No, not in the sense of market share or anything, but in the technical sense of you have to worry about them in the code.
I run into this programming for Unix. Sure, there's probably hundreds of versions of Unix out there, hundreds of thousands if you count variations in installed software. But in large part I can ignore them. The major question is usually "SysV or BSD?", that is are the system's APIs based on BSD's or System V's. Some libraries I care about version but I often only care about large swathes of versions, eg. I care whether OpenSSL is 0.9.7 vs. 0.9.8 but I don't care about 0.9.8e vs. 0.9.8n (other than that 8e has bugs that're fixed in 8n, but that won't usually affect my code). And of course different hardware has different screen resolutions, but then I shouldn't be hard-coding for exact screen resolution anyway. Make the relevant calls to find out the screen size and just adapt to it, and you'll usually find you have a few general sizes you need to handle and a plethora of one real close to one of those general sizes that you can just handle automatically. Eg. a 328-pixel width probably can use the same layout, icon sizes etc. as a 320-pixel width, just make the main area 8 pixels wider or add a pixel to each side of padding and border spaces to make up the 8 pixels.
You don't handle driving a car by learning how to drive a Ford Focus, and then learning how to drive a Ford Fusion, and then learning how to drive a Chevy Cobalt, and then learning how to drive a Toyota Camry, and so on, and then when faced with a Hyundai Sonata you have to sit there and wait for someone to teach you how to drive one because you haven't driven one before. You learn how to drive a car, and you apply that general method to the particular kind of car you're in at the moment. The controls may be a bit different on each make and model, but the truly basic ones boil down to "Manual or automatic?". Beyond that, things like the headlight switch, turn signals, wipers, radio and all the rest are usually a matter of a couple minutes to sort out. If someone complained that there's thousands of makes, models and years of car out there and it's so much work learning to drive all of them, you'd laugh at them I'm sure. Computer systems are the same way: you don't learn every variant individually unless you're just starting out, you learn different kinds of systems and how to categorize any particular system by what kind it is in a particular area.
War Stories (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone who doesn't see this as a problem probably has never really had to deal with configuration management and Q/A issues in a production environment.
I have, and if I were an app developer, this info would scare the crap out of me. Keeping your product stable, repeatable, and traceable on a single platform is hard enough.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
As a consumer of apps, why the fuck should you care what language the platform uses?
Anonymous troll posting 2girls1cup videos.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)