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How Fragmented Is Android?

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Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#131

Post by milleramp »

on_and_off wrote: post #4

I work on an Android app aimed at the North American market. Android O, P and Q are 88% of our Android devices. By far and large, fragmentation is something I _never_ have to think about. Jetpack libraries are here to handle it for us, as an abstraction layer between the OS and third party apps. I would have mentioned that e.g. camera apps are an exception : here hardware fragmentation can be a pain. I was half surpr…

“e.g. camera apps are an exception”

This is a huge exception that suppresses third party innovation.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#132

Post by saagarjha »

ehsankia wrote: post #129
rarestblog wrote: post #15

Well, if you remove all iOS versions with https://i.imgur.com/0Ar0ta5.png My point being: there ARE other iOS versions in use. I have a backup working iPhone 4 turned on right now. It won't upgrade beyond iOS 5 (I think it's iOS 5). But somehow the author ignores all those 0.1% iOS versions, yet shows them for Android (with 4 decimals no less).

Also, if you want a fair comparison, compare fragmentation between iPhone's and Pixel phones. Yes, I realize that as a developer, fragmentation can be more of a pain on Android, but comparing it directly to iOS is comparing Apples to oranges.

Very few people buy Pixel phones.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#133

Post by saagarjha »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #16
pekalicious wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Samsung phones consumer hostile? Their ridiculous prices? Because I wouldn't call that hostile, rather simply overpriced. And I would agree that they are. However, I still have every galaxy note I have ever owned, working, and in great condition (Note 2, 5, and now 8). My dad is actually using the 5. All of them got upgraded at least once to a newer Android OS and they are still solid devices. Granted, oth…

Samsung phones ship with ROMs that try to remove as much of the native Android experience as possible, and tend to eat battery life for no good reason. Swapping ROMs to AOSP-like experiences vastly improves battery life and performance on many Samsung phones. Several Galaxy and Note devices also cannot ROM swap at all due to locked bootloaders, which makes that the most consumer hostile thing of all. I'm not sure whi…

Under your definition, Samsung is by far not the only "consumer hostile" company–your definition is par for the course for most large OEMs.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#134

Post by saagarjha »

megy wrote: post #111
scarface74 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, the article fails to mention that Apple refuses to let you support devices after EOL, and even some of the oldest Android devices in existence can run even the newest Android, as long as you're willing to upgrade the ROM yourself. The 2012 iPhone 5 is the newest unsupported iPhone. Would you really want to support a phone that old and have to support both a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of your app?

> and have to support both a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of your app? For a developer, there is no difference between a 32-bit and 64-bit.

This depends on what you app does.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#135

Post by saagarjha »

scarface74 wrote: post #74
DiabloD3 wrote: post #10

The article concludes, as far as I can tell, it isn't fragmented, it just has a bunch of recent enough versions on similar enough devices to run most apps. Apps don't care what version of Android you run, they care what API support you have, and apps can detect API support at runtime and adapt. OTOH, the article fails to mention that Apple refuses to let you support devices after EOL, and even some of the oldest Andr…

OTOH, the article fails to mention that Apple refuses to let you support devices after EOL, and even some of the oldest Android devices in existence can run even the newest Android, as long as you're willing to upgrade the ROM yourself. The 2012 iPhone 5 is the newest unsupported iPhone. Would you really want to support a phone that old and have to support both a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of your app?

iPhone 5C is "newer" than iPhone 5, technically, since it was released in 2013.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#136

Post by saagarjha »

ryandrake wrote: post #98
jmiskovic wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not against 64-bit build, but it's too big effort. This feels like blackmail: "Either invest 40ish hours of your time to compile the framework and all dependencies to 64-bit, or you won't be able to update the app for existing users anymore" I don't care about 64-bit devices. I'm fine with them not being able to install or run the app, if that's how it is. People with 64-bit devices can easily afford better produ…

For all but the most complex, or assembly-optimized, or just poorly written software, supporting 64-bit should be no more than a recompile. When I started producing 64-bit versions of my iOS apps, at first I didn’t even know it happened because Xcode just did it for me. Any yes, they included C and C++, and 3rd party code. It took zero hours to support. It was almost too automatic for comfort.

You might not always have access to the source of something you ship with your app.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#137

Post by saagarjha »

robocat wrote: post #78
jmiskovic wrote: post #21

I'm not a professional app developer. A year ago I invested few months to develop an app I wanted to have. Today it has few thousand users. Fragmentation doesn't bother me. Yes, on some devices the app crashes, on others the sound lag is unbearable. I don't really care, as long as it works fine on most devices. Two things infuriate me, though. Enough to never again spend another minute developing for android. Every t…

> Every time I enter android studio, it wants to update Xcode is always bumping versions too. > The second thing is recent requirement to provide 64-bit version of each app. iOS had this issue too.

Xcode comes as one bundle, though.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#138

Post by saagarjha »

jmiskovic wrote: post #21

I'm not a professional app developer. A year ago I invested few months to develop an app I wanted to have. Today it has few thousand users. Fragmentation doesn't bother me. Yes, on some devices the app crashes, on others the sound lag is unbearable. I don't really care, as long as it works fine on most devices. Two things infuriate me, though. Enough to never again spend another minute developing for android. Every t…

> Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide".

FWIW, Apple did exactly this a while before Google did.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#139

Post by p1necone »

on_and_off wrote: post #58
blihp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're rolling with whatever Google's latest 'solution' to fragmentation is, so of course it's not going to be an issue: Google is dropping old devices for you so they never even appear in your console stats.[1] This is a perfectly valid business decision to take on your end, but it doesn't mean that the problem doesn't still exist... only that you aren't having to deal with it. I've got several still…

>It sounds like you're rolling with whatever Google's latest 'solution' to fragmentation > You say that O/P/Q are 88% of your devices but they only represent 38.7% of devices accessing the market NO !! That's the issue with these articles. They just read the android dashboard and pretend that: - it applies everywhere - many different devices = difficulty for the devs or users The dashboard reports the global figures.…

This reminds me of browser usage stats showing that x% of people are still using IE 6 or whatever. In reality a huge number of those are probably web crawlers or malware or something spoofing it's browser id.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#140

Post by codedokode »

Const-me wrote: post #120
ryandrake wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think iPad 3 is even “old”. I have an original iPad 1, and the situation is even worse: I’m frozen in time on iOS 5, and the device has been losing app availability for years. Without jail breaking, it can basically only do what was installed with it from the factory. The hardware itself outlasts most companies’ software support by 2-4X. I see a bleak future of millions of perfectly usable devices that are on…

> where I can still run recent versions of Linux on devices 10-20 years old. 10 sure, but not 20. 20 years ago the devices had 32 bit CPUs, the support for them is being phased out. The last 32-bit Ubuntu LTS is 16.04.6, from 2016.

Doesn't Debian support 32-bit systems? Also, using 64-bit has little value if you have less than 8 Gb of RAM.
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