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How Fragmented Is Android?

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Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#181

Post by on_and_off »

izuchukwu wrote: post #160
on_and_off wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.…

I believe in the comment you’re replying to, “the market” is actually referring to the Android Market, the original name of the Google Play Store, rather than the economic market of serviceable users.

ah, I see.

It still misses the whole point though.

Again, the global numbers are pretty meaningless for app developers.

Even if your app is called gmail, at some point you will see that you have 0.01% of your users on a very old version of Android. And you are not going to cut them off, just freeze an apk that will be their last version.

And for almost all apps, your useage stats won't look like these global numbers.

We are doing everything we can to increase our user numbers .. if it meant lowering the min supported version, we would do it but it is just not something that would help us.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#182

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

oblio wrote: post #173
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don’t know, older Androids take 4-5 seconds to parse my webpack bundle. That’s not too bad for these devices, given that once it’s all parsed and evaluated, the app seems to work fine. I do want to buy some even older devices to see how they run. With webpack and a little effort, ares these older phones really bricks?

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#184

Post by pjmlp »

kalleboo wrote: post #178
pjmlp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is the point of Project Treble, where drivers run as user space processes and use Android IPC to talk with the kernel.

But, big but, the OEMs are free to decide when and how those updates are made available to users.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#185

Post by robocat »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #182
oblio wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don’t know, older Androids take 4-5 seconds to parse my webpack bundle. That’s not too bad for these devices, given that once it’s all parsed and evaluated, the app seems to work fine. I do want to buy some even older devices to see how they run. With webpack and a little effort, ares these older phones really bricks?

We still support Android 4.1, iOS7, and IE9 because our users don't choose to use our web app (their company does). There are low income users in our demographic for whom spending money to upgrade their phone is not their priority.

With care it is possible to make mobile web apps run at a reasonable speed even on low end devices. I personally like to aim to make things work OK on shitty old devices, that way I know it works well on newer devices. Also our code (custom) was originally written for IE6 so we started light, which helped.

A framework that appears to be good on low end devices is svelte.dev: "Last month, a developer in Brazil shared that [Svelte is] being used for point of sale systems in Brazil. There are like 200,000 of these devices in the wild. His job is to build this interface for the point of sale system. They're working with a very outdated version of WebKit on extremely memory constrained and performance constrained hardware. They tried a dozen different frameworks and none of them were up to the task. You would press a button on this interface and, half a second later, it would respond, which is kind of an awful user experience because you're more likely to press that button twice and end up overcharging your customers or something like that. They tried it with Svelte and it worked smoothly, so that is an example of what you can do when you have a framework that has a very, very low memory footprint and very good performance. Another example, we have a guy using it in the context of smart televisions, which also tend to be quite constrained devices." From: https://shoptalkshow.com/episodes/349/

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#186

Post by tempodox »

> ...owners (hopefully) buy a new Android device which offers latest updates.

A new Android device will get one “latest update”. Before the user buys it. After that, it will be just as fragmented as the rest.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#187

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

robocat wrote: post #185
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, older Androids take 4-5 seconds to parse my webpack bundle. That’s not too bad for these devices, given that once it’s all parsed and evaluated, the app seems to work fine. I do want to buy some even older devices to see how they run. With webpack and a little effort, ares these older phones really bricks?

We still support Android 4.1, iOS7, and IE9 because our users don't choose to use our web app (their company does). There are low income users in our demographic for whom spending money to upgrade their phone is not their priority. With care it is possible to make mobile web apps run at a reasonable speed even on low end devices. I personally like to aim to make things work OK on shitty old devices, that way I know i…

I’m excited to try Svelte. Looks great.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#188

Post by jessshorland »

I work at a company that distributes an Android SDK specifically for East/West/Southern Africa and South Asia. So far (and we are extremely early stage) we've seen 2,992 unique make/model combinations, and from there the OS ranges from v4.3 - 9.0 and everywhere in between. There's a huge backward compatibility problem in these markets -- we had to build our own dual sim API because of it. Device specific issues are extremely real, and as far as I can tell, Google does not have a great strategy for these markets that make up a not insignificant (and growing) portion of their market share. Android users who are sensitive to data usage/costs don't upgrade their OS often, and have secondhand or imported devices with some kind of customized OS.

https://medium.com/use-hover/hover-launches-v1-0-stable-and-...

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#189

Post by lern_too_spel »

pjmlp wrote: post #151
lern_too_spel wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first part of your solution conflicts with the second. You cannot both require new hardware for an OS version and require OS updates for old hardware.

It works for the PC market, as incredible as it may sound. Those minimum requirements aren't set in stone, and OEMs seem to comply with them, strangely.

> Those minimum requirements aren't set in stone

is in direct disagreement with

> Have made it compulsory on Android 7

which is my point.

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