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How Fragmented Is Android?

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Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#91

Post by ggg2 »

robocat wrote: post #76
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #60

I know this post is about Android versions but I recently launched a new service and have been watching user agents and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see no matter the Android version, it’s almost always running Chrome 73/Firefox 66. I have a user running Android 5.5.1, another on some version of 4! Yet they’re on modern browsers. This isn’t true for anyone on an old iOS. Those users are stuck with old browsers,…

FYI: Android 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 will soon get no more updates to Chrome[1]. Android 4.0 is stuck on an old version of Chrome. For WebView, Android 4.4 is stuck on Chrome 30/33 and anything older still uses AOSP. Samsung users often use the Samsung browser, which is often a very obsolete version that came with the phone. 1. https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-android-droppin...

hopefully firefox will continue to run fine on those (and get faster over time)

chrome on android is dead to me. so many antifeatures it's maddening.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#92

Post by scarface74 »

pjmlp wrote: post #82
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?

May 2019 Windows 10 version runs just fine on this 2009 laptop.

The smart phone market and the related chipset is seeing the same jump in performance that personal computers saw in their first decade.

Could Windows 95 run on a computer from 1985?

My 2009 era Core 2 Duo Dell E6500 - that I still own (https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E6500-Not...) had 8 GB of RAM, gigabit Ethernet, a 1920x1200 display, 160GB hard drive, etc. Besides the processor, those are still decent specs for today and even the processor is good enough

The iPhone of 2009 was a 3GS - 320x480 display, 256MB of RAM,802.11G, with a single core 400Mhz processor and slow video graphics by today’s standards.

Compare that to the specs of even the low end $475 iPhone 7.

The Core 2 Duo was already a 64 bit processor. The iPhone didn’t ship with a 64 bit processor until four years later.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#93

Post by pjmlp »

ajnin wrote: post #64

I've been tracking the data from Google's Android dashboards over time : https://www.bidouille.org/misc/androidcharts From these observations, it seems that Android's fragmentation is getting worse, and that newer versions of Android have more and more trouble establishing themselves as the dominant version. In fact, JellyBean was the last version to reach more than 50%.

Which is the reason why Google has finally added an update clause to their services contract, as OEMs are starting to not pay attention to their new versions.

In Germany, on consumer stores at shopping malls you can still buy pre-paid devices with Lollipop.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#95

Post by kitsunesoba »

throw03172019 wrote: post #43
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…

I’ve been doing iOS since 2008 and the “specific fixes” are definitely more common these days! iOS used to be a simple platform with one standard phone size and tablet size but it started to increase in complexity with all the new devices today (I’m looking at you iPhone X). iOS 6 -> iOS 7-8 was such a pain to main backward compatibility because of all the navigation/status bar changes. I still find iOS to be my pref…

In my experience, iOS is still pretty close to, “it just works” if one sticks to recommended practices (autolayout, etc). Not perfect, but not bad either.

Of course if you’re writing manual frame code or using some third party UI library, that’s a very different story…

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#96

Post by klingonopera »

stesch wrote: post #25

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?

It provides economic opportunities for third party services. Supporting your local IT/Phone-store around the corner in assisting me is preferable to me than to buy a new phone.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#97

Post by ryandrake »

radley wrote: post #63
blihp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point taken that the U.S./Canada stats likely skew to more recent versions. However, I'm in the U.S. and several of my devices couldn't possibly even download his company's app. Granted, I'm an outlier and tend to use my devices until they die. (they are actually still pretty useful around-the-house devices and can browse the web, watch videos, play some older games etc. Maybe I'll fire up a couple of them and open t…

That's not unique to Android. I still use an old iPad 3 (stuck on iOS 9) for movies & audiobooks in bed. I can still use Netflix, Plex, & Audible because I downloaded them a long time ago. But I recently switched to 1Password and I can't install it on that iPad.

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 only unusable because developers decided to stop keeping their software compatible.

Contrast that with the world of PCs where I can still run recent versions of Linux on devices 10-20 years old.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#98

Post by ryandrake »

jmiskovic wrote: post #87
izacus wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#99

Post by bahmboo »

I have an ipad 3 (yah the original ipad on its 3rd iteration). Apple was supporting os updates until fairly recently. The thing is that none of the modern apps tested or cared about something that old. So even if was technically supported the experience was borderline unusable. Even the core ipad usage was klunky. Stuff gets old and we move on.

Re: How Fragmented Is Android?

#100

Post by stevehb »

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).

That's a good point. The list for Android fragmentation even includes 2.0 Eclair, which has 0% across the whole row!
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