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How Fragmented Is Android?

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Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#171

Post by Liquid_Fire »

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…

> OnePlus supports Android on their phones ridiculously long times.

I would challenge that. I'm still waiting for Android Pie (August 2018) on my OnePlus 3T (November 2016). That's not even two years, and while OnePlus have promised to eventually bring Pie to this phone, it's already almost 9 months late. By the time the 3T is updated to Pie, Android Q will be out.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#172

Post by ljcn »

Const-me wrote: post #147
Beldin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu 16.04 is still receiving updates - unlike typical Android phones from the same era. While you might not get the latest kernel with it, as far as I can tell, there is nothing in its package manager that doesn't run on hardware from 2016. Unkike typical Android devices from the same era.

> as I can tell, there is nothing in its package manager that doesn't run on hardware from 2016. Right, but 20 years ago was 1999. I won’t be surprised to find out many packages won’t work: that CPU doesn’t have SSE2, the RAM limit is 512 MB, and typical systems usually had 64 or 128 MB. The official page says recommended minimum requirements for Ubuntu 16.04 are 2 GHz dual core processor with 2GB RAM. 20 years old P…

Ubuntu is heavy though. You can install the latest Slackware on a 486 with 64 MB of RAM.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#173

Post by oblio »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #165
oblio wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android 4.1-3 are from 2012, early 2013. So 6-7 years old. Those old devices are barely functional to view modern webpages, anyway.

That’s the assumption I made but is that actually true you think? This is true of iOS devices after OS upgrades, I’ve experienced this myself: Apple ruins old devices with software updates. But I somehow doubt that a phone from 2012 must be ruined with bad software. Any idea?

Not bad software, underpowered mobile device CPUs. Mobile CPUs have only started stabilizing around "good enough" around late 2016 and that was for flagships (with Snapdragon 820, basically).

A mid range Android phone CPU will choke quite hard on modern Javascript-heavy web pages. Now think about a low range phone...

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#174

Post by steve_adams_86 »

ehsankia wrote: post #141
saagarjha wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few people buy Pixel phones.

That's beside the point, as we are talking about fragmentation percentages. The point is, Apple has full control over their hardware, so obviously they will have less fragmentation. To have a fair comparison, we should compare to Pixel where Google has full control over.

That's not really fair still because it's about OS fragmentation, not hardware. Whether Google or Apple has full control is beside the point, isn't it?

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#175

Post by krschultz »

1) Do this analysis for your own user base, universal stats may not be relevant.

2) It's more helpful to look at aggregations on cuts that will impact your product and codebase. e.g. % of devices above API level 19, % of users with each screen size grouping, what % of our users are on tablets, etc. These answer questions when you should drop support for an API, when you should start using new features, how many different UI mocks you need. Those are the relevant questions.

3) Do test your UX across a couple different phones categories. Samsung & vanilla Android have different button placements and icons.

4) There are plenty of libraries and tools available to handle this problem. I won't say it's not something to think about, but it's usually pretty low on my list.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#176

Post by cat199 »

Const-me wrote: post #157
microtonal wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But I think it’ll only a matter of time before they stop, too. It will probably take at least 5-10 years before all major distributions will stop and their support periods will be over. Once we are there, there is still NetBSD and OpenBSD. Heck, NetBSD still supports VAX.

> Heck, NetBSD still supports VAX. I wonder about the level of VAX support. Do they just have old code lying in the repository, do they build it, or do the devs actually have a working VAX machine and they test new builds?

Not a dev, but as i understand it as a Vaxstation 4000 owner who boots up from time to time to enjoy the beeps:

a) build.sh allows cross compilation, which helps with build validation (although openbsd built native until they dropped vax ~3y ago)

b) there are a few dedicated devs on vax. these pretty much do the work as a hobby, and things are best effort, but generally in sync with the rest of the tree. most of these own a vax or three, but you can also run on SimH and probably other vax emulators.

c) really, the system source is modular enough that adjusting device drivers for well documented hardware which has existed for years, and tweaking a few already-implemented since the 80s macro primitives is most of what is needed to keep things running -most of the adjustments to the system itself happen higher up the stack (e.g in the generic c portion of the kernel, or in the c library). Granted, this does mean knowing the ISA and HW in and out, and having skills to debug/reason about low-level instruction/hardware sorts of issues, but, hey, that's who codes open source os'es anyway.. Besides, if you are a true VAX BSD UNIX hacker, you've been tweaking your kernel sources since you manually toggled in the 3BSD bootstrap in 1979 :b

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#177

Post by IshKebab »

somedudetbh wrote: post #53

From the article: "So the Android ecosystem is split between at least 1,728 combinations of OS - Brand - Device Model" It's actually _much worse_ than this. Here's a review of the "Samsung Galaxy S10+": https://www.anandtech.com/show/14072/the-samsung-galaxy-s10p... This "device model" is actually two devices with completely different SoCs. There is no meaningful sense in which these two phones are one device. Someti…

It's probably not worse than that because he makes the totally incorrect assumption that Android version and device are independent, which is obviously not the case.

Most people update their phones to the latest available version for their phone, so it would be 144 OS-device-manufacturer combos (more or less).

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#178

Post by kalleboo »

pjmlp wrote: post #150
kalleboo wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if they did that, instead you would have just bought a phone that was stuck on Android 6 > made OS updates a requirement of the Android licence contract Now you're being contradictory. You want to force manufacturers to always update to the new Android versions. But you ALSO want to make Android 7 require specific hardware features. How could these requirements work together?

The same way they have worked forever on the PC world. OS updates always work with fallbacks, and minimum hardware specifications get revised every few years. Google can ask Microsoft how to do it.

That is something Google could do to actually solve things - make the OS binary compatible (rather than requiring device manufacturers to recompile) with driver blob plug-ins. It would require a change to the Linux driver ABI model but without know anything about Android I kind of assume they've already done that.
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