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How Fragmented Is Android?

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Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#31

Post by com2kid »

Knufen wrote: post #22
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.

I have plenty of memory, I don't want apps force closed.

If I switch from a game to a browser to look something up, being able to switch back to the (paused) game 5 minutes later is a feature, not a bug.

Apps that obey backgrounding and stop doing work (e.g. burning CPU/Power) are fine.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#32

Post by matwood »

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…

It's been awhile since I've done Android development, but are you including the Kindle devices in your numbers? Best I can tell the latest FireOS is based on Nougat.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#33

Post by monocasa »

djsumdog wrote: post #5
monocasa wrote: post #2

These articles rarely go over what, if any, practical concerns there are. The Wintel market is even more fragmented, but that's not really an issue in practice because the abstractions are more or less in the right place.

You can install stock Win 10 on any machine you buy, or most Linux distros with the same boot image thanks to UEFI and the PC spec. Android ARMs are NOT an architecture. They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels. Oreo and the /vendor partition may help with this some. Still, it's a far cry from the Linux/PCs days of the 90s. I've written about this before: ht…

But none of that matters for app developers.

(Also, Wintel machines are very much random pins soldered to random crap, they just do a better job papering over it with ACPI AML bytecode)

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#34

Post by orangecat »

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…

camera apps are an exception : here hardware fragmentation can be a pain

Yes. The backwards sensors in the Nexus 5x and 6 were particularly amusing/irritating: https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9696774/google-nexus-5x-u....

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#35

Post by pjc50 »

derefr wrote: post #7
djsumdog wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can install stock Win 10 on any machine you buy, or most Linux distros with the same boot image thanks to UEFI and the PC spec. Android ARMs are NOT an architecture. They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels. Oreo and the /vendor partition may help with this some. Still, it's a far cry from the Linux/PCs days of the 90s. I've written about this before: ht…

> They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels. Sounds like arcade cabinets. Maybe we need something that does for Android ARM devices what MAME does for those: specifies each device as an abstract wiring diagram of pins to bits of patched kernel acting as ROMs. And then make that whole thing into a kernel virtualization-provider module, which uses the stock ker…

This is what devicetree is supposed to be.

However, as with the arctic machine, the incentives are misaligned - they actively don't want to be commoditized.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#36

Post by matwood »

Gudin wrote: post #27
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.

"Addressable" market share maybe? A developer can target iOS current version and current version-1, and cover the large majority of iOS devices. How far back does an Android developer have to target? Maybe it doesn't matter since the Android marketshare is so much larger that targeting current - 1 stills gets more devices than iOS.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#37

Post by MiddleEndian »

monocasa wrote: post #2

These articles rarely go over what, if any, practical concerns there are. The Wintel market is even more fragmented, but that's not really an issue in practice because the abstractions are more or less in the right place.

Wintel is something that could be taken down a notch, but it seems everything outside of the x86 family is even worse.

If I buy a Dell laptop or a Lenovo laptop, it will come with a bunch of useless junk installed that nobody in their right mind would ever want, like Lenovo's useless gigantic Wi-Fi icon in Windows (last observed by me in a T520). But not only can I uninstall all of that junk software, I am still running real Windows. And that means I can update it normally.

Compare that to an Android device. You get a phone from a company like Samsung and you cannot uninstall the Facebook app no matter what you do. You get a phone from HTC and maybe they decide to push an update from 7.something to 8.0 and 8.0 introduces a new issue. That is fixed in 8.1 but you can never actually upgrade to 8.1 because it's not the real version of Android it's the HTC version of Android and they have ordained that your device shall never go past 8.0 and they pushed some firmware "security" update that prevents you from installing any other OS on your device. Additionally, some software seems to be dictated by your mobile carrier, which would be like allowing Comcast to control what you run on your PC.

So whatever fragmentation there is on Wintel (or LinAmd), it is not nearly as hostile to the user as the Android ecosystem.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#38

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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).

The other point is that most Apple store apps become uninstallable on anything older than three iOS versions.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#39

Post by gshdg »

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).

What percentage of the iPhone market can you reach by supporting only versions with >2% penetration? What percentage of the Android market?

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#40

Post by djsumdog »

pjc50 wrote: post #35
derefr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels. Sounds like arcade cabinets. Maybe we need something that does for Android ARM devices what MAME does for those: specifies each device as an abstract wiring diagram of pins to bits of patched kernel acting as ROMs. And then make that whole thing into a kernel virtualization-provider module, which uses the stock ker…

This is what devicetree is supposed to be. However, as with the arctic machine, the incentives are misaligned - they actively don't want to be commoditized.

Windows phones did at least have UEFI + arm. You can unlock the bootloaders of many of them now. But there's still no driver support for mobile data and several other critical hardware components.
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