How Fragmented Is Android?
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How Fragmented Is Android?
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Re: How Fragmented Is Android?
#2These 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.
Re: How Fragmented Is Android?
#3These 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.
The articles states the vast majority of android phones do not receive any updates but Google is able to collect valuable data from these devices. I beleieve this is a practical concern.
Re: How Fragmented Is Android?
#4I 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 surprised to see that Google is also working on that one with the camera x library.
There have been cases where the fragmentation bites us; and there might be in the future (although in all fainess my iOS colleagues sometimes have to create specific fixes as well) but the last time I had to scratch my head because of a device specific bug was years ago.
And at the time, I was already finding these articles deeply ridiculous.
Re: How Fragmented Is Android?
#5These 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:
Re: How Fragmented Is Android?
#6The fault of fragmentation lies at many levels, including distributors. The bookstore at my alma mater in the Midwest is normally great at promoting modern tech products, but they recently started pushing two models of a phone with KitKat at $100+ pricepoints. That's Android 4.4, which was deprecated in 2015. Who are these phones for? They're not even suitable for computer science students, because trying to learn Android development with a KitKat device is incredibly suboptimal.
Re: How Fragmented Is Android?
#7These 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…
> 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 kernel for anything not masked over by ROMs.
Re: How Fragmented Is Android?
#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.
Re: How Fragmented Is Android?
#9Khronos likes to talk about Vulkan support on Android.
The reality is that thanks for it being an optional API, introduced in version 7, only flagships have proper support.
And even then, each OEM provides a different version, with their own set of instructions.
Hardly any better than GL ES.
Now they are doing it compulsory on Android 9, upgradable via the store, with GL support being supported via ANGLE.
Guess what, first you need to get a device with Android 9 on it.
This just an example among many others across other API surface areas.
So much for Java on mobiles being too much of fragmented system that Google was going to sort out with their solution, hence the need to undercut Sun.
Re: How Fragmented Is Android?
#10The 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 Android devices in existence can run even the newest Android, as long as you're willing to upgrade the ROM yourself.
Phone hardware typically is literally falling apart after 3-5 years, any truly old phones are ones that users have chose to keep on life support but not upgrade their ROMs (or made the mistake of buying a phone from a consumer-hostile brand, which is, ultimately, the only valid argument for Android fragmentation).
The only company that is truly consumer hostile is Samsung. And, frankly, I don't know why anyone would buy Samsung or Apple or even Google's own Pixel series... OnePlus charged me $550 for a phone (the 6T) that has the same size screen (and its an AMOLED too), literally same parts, but with more RAM and storage, and a bigger battery, that is otherwise identical to a Pixel 3XL or a Samsung S9+ or whatever top tier extra large phone that costs $800-1300; and that new 7 Pro? Still an amazing deal, and OnePlus supports Android on their phones ridiculously long times.