Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Fragmented Is Android?

eggonomy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 189 posts

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#21

Post by jmiskovic »

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 time I enter android studio, it wants to update. The studio wants to update. Suddenly it's incompatible with build system (yes, the build system has dependencies on IDE version!). Then gradle wants to update. Then SDK. Then IDE again. It's never-ending cycle of updates. Each update has 20% chance to cause build errors on this project (Love2D for Android). Each error has a cryptic message, and it's resolved by something completely unrelated to error message. Usually it's solved by bumping up the minimal SDK version and thus cutting off some percentage of potential users. I dread each and every attempt to re-build my app.

The second thing is recent requirement to provide 64-bit version of each app. My app depends on framework written in C++ with additional libraries in C. I can't and won't spend time to get the build for 64-bit version working. 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". So I won't be able to update existing app to existing users ever again, for non-technical reasons.

Fragmentation I can deal with. All web developers deal with it daily. But Google's treatment of development is horrible and I don't want any part of it. Because of this I've transitioned to web as platform. At least I can be safe that anything I build will be runnable in 10 or 20 years.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#22

Post by Knufen »

com2kid wrote: post #19

Something that doesn't get talked about as much is the differences between how manufacturers customize their OS. It has been talked about a fair bit on HN ( https://dontkillmyapp.com/ ), but it really is a huge problem. I can be listening to music on my phone and One+ will just kill Pandora, or Spotify. I have to manually "lock" music apps and workout apps in One+'s task switching UI to keep them from being randomly…

I have a One+ and I can't really recommend Greenify (App) enough. Forces all apps to shutdown, even those running in the background.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#23

Post by mberning »

rocky1138 wrote: post #18

> The vast majority of iPhone users update to the latest version quite fast and flawlessly. Has this person ever been around iPhone owners when a new update comes out? I seem to remember a ton of lamentation at every step of slower speed, worse battery, laggy UI, moved features, removed features, and the like. Yeah, there's a lot of different Android versions out there. Who cares? Other than security updates, it's pr…

Maybe on one particular major version update. The vast majority of updates are completely painless, as evidenced by such a large percentage of people having no reservation about updating to the latest version.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#24

Post by pekalicious »

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…

Well, in that case, I agree. I've only unlocked my Note 2 for a specific reason, and never had to do it again in any device since. Battery life on Notes are nothing to rave about, but neither a huge issue. But yeah, it does have many issue with bloatware, locking, non-native UI, etc. Even if they don't personally bother me, I will acknowledge that.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#25

Post by stesch »

I'm wondering if letting your app support very old OS versions is a good thing. You get more customers but aren't the ones with the old OS more likely be the ones causing the most problems (= work) because they aren't very tech savvy?

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#26

Post by IloveHN84 »

jherdman wrote: post #8

> My POV is ... Apple leads the Mobile OS market share ... by a huge margin. I'm having a really hard time understanding this statement. Does the author mean with respect to how updates are handled? It clearly cannot mean in terms of sheer number of installs, Android is clearly _leagues_ ahead of iOS in that regard.

Wait, what? We are comparing really the 90% of Android Global Market Share vs 9% of iOS?

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#27

Post by Gudin »

jherdman wrote: post #8

> My POV is ... Apple leads the Mobile OS market share ... by a huge margin. I'm having a really hard time understanding this statement. Does the author mean with respect to how updates are handled? It clearly cannot mean in terms of sheer number of installs, Android is clearly _leagues_ ahead of iOS in that regard.

The conclusion is unexpected and stupid.

Android doesn't brag it has 75% share. Actual data is that 85% of smartphones run Android and that's market share. Fact that they are not updated to the latest version doesn't change the market share.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#28

Post by Avamander »

mattlondon wrote: post #13
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…

+1 I have a few hobby apps on the app store that gave had a few thousand downloads. Not a huge sample but generally speaking it's N+ that has the vast majority of users. My apps are fairly standard or are games - most API levels since M seem to basically cover everything I need 99% of the time. I have no interest AT ALL in the manufacturer of the device. Fragmentation simply doesn't feel like an issue, at least to me…

Fragmentation becomes an issue when you're either building services that run in the background or interact with hardware (BT, WiFi, WiFi-direct, Camera, GNSS, Gyro/Accel). I feel fragmentation hard with my app.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#29

Post by stesch »

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).

By the way: iPhone 4 supports iOS 7.1.2, released 4 years after the iPhone 4.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#30

Post by snek »

com2kid wrote: post #19

Something that doesn't get talked about as much is the differences between how manufacturers customize their OS. It has been talked about a fair bit on HN ( https://dontkillmyapp.com/ ), but it really is a huge problem. I can be listening to music on my phone and One+ will just kill Pandora, or Spotify. I have to manually "lock" music apps and workout apps in One+'s task switching UI to keep them from being randomly…

I've had a 1+1, 1+3, and 1+5, and I never had this issue on any of them.
Post reply on HN