Android's "Extreme Fragmentation," Colorfully Visualized by TweetDeck's Team

Original source: http://blog.tweetdeck.com/android-ecosystem

"extreme fragmentation."

Kind of like IBM compatibles? Or maybe Java-capable phones?

Diversity of hardware is not something to be afraid of. Yes, it can cause a few difficulties, but it also provides a much wider market to sell to at the same time.

Choice is good.

The first pie chart is split by hardware and shows only adoption (a good thing), not fragmentation.

The second pie chart is split by OS ID strings. While it shows fragmentation, it hugely exaggerates it because it counts all builds of a given version, say of 2.2, as unique even though they are built from the same or similar (i.e. bugfixed) sources. Besides that, there a a lot of single digit builds that are unidentifiable based on the name - what version of Android are the two copies of "Interceptor V5", for instance?

As a thought exercise, imagine what that pie chart would look like for any phone OS other than iOS. Symbian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_OS and Windows Mobile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_mobile (soon to become fragmented again as WP7) both have several major version (i.e. true fragmentation) and many, many different handset manufacturers and flavors within each major version.

Supporting a wider variety of hardware does not necessarily lead to commanding a larger market share. Who's to say a smaller number of devices that Google (or the device makers) were able to spend more time on supporting and polishing wouldn't sell more units than the broad array of phones we see? It would certainly lower the barrier to creating great apps on the platform, which would encourage wider adoption.

It seems silly to me to say blankly that "Choice is good." Obviously there are upper limits on how true that can be. If Motorola were designing and shipping and selling thirty different android phones right now, that choice would not be good. The phones would suffer and customers wouldn't know where to begin thinking about which phone they wanted.

The hassles for a developer associated with testing and making apps compatible on such a wide variety of devices are not trivial. It's a tradeoff, and Google is making no effort to control how that tradeoff breaks. Microsoft is taking a different approach. We'll see how that plays into things.