>At least on Android you can write one app and then tweak it to work on different devices, previously you had to write apps as different as Android/iOS/Windows for each device - and often individual manufacturers even had multiple platforms to write for.
>So I think we owe Google some congratulations.
Before Android, you could write a Windows Mobile app and have it run pretty much on every Windows Mobile device and the same with Blackberry and iPhones.
The biggest problem with Android is that the OEMs and carriers abuse the open nature to make their own custom skins which are not compatible with updates. Google did not take a hard line on this like, say, Windows Phone did
Also, to be more serious, Pocket PC once ran on top of two processor families, so if you think fragmentation with a VM is bad, it's a lot worse when you have to build two binaries and try to explain to users which one they need to install.
The Holo theme is required to be present on all devices that wish to carry the play store. If you write an app targeting 4.0 or higher that uses the default theme, it will look the same across all phones.
> However, you will lose the 2.3 users, who still hold a ton of market share.
Like with all massive ecosystems, change in the android world takes time. Google is addressing the problem and solutions, like instituting a required theme, are rolling out.
Give it a year, maybe a year and a half, and the need to support 2.3 will be much less pressing.
No it isn't. The GP isn't saying people buy the phones for the crapware, the GP is saying that the carriers wouldn't have adopted it if they couldn't put their bloat on it.
While Apple was in a very strong position, the carriers had a strong interest in another player to counter Apple's market power. In the case of fragmentation, I think Google was just more willing to negotiate away things like this in the interest of getting a strong presence on the devices.
So you mean Google picked popularity over consistency and sold out to the OEMs and carriers for the sake of marketshare? Android is the pretty much the only OS where this is such a big problem, unlike Windows, OS X, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Windows Phone, iOS and probably even Linux.
I don't know where you get your information from, but Blackberry has broken compatibility in the last 3 OS releases, and Windows Phone 8 doesn't even run the same kernel as the previous version (breaks compatibility). I'm not sure if you ever touched Java ME back in the day... but yeah. You're just wrong on this one.
>Windows Phone 8 doesn't even run the same kernel as the previous version (breaks compatibility)
Windows Phone 7 apps run fine on WP8. Anyway breaking compatibility is a tad different from fragmentation. If your app runs on a WP7 phone, you can be reasonably certain it runs on all other WP7 phones. With Android, you can easily run into device specific bugs even though the version is the same and thus you're forced to test on the real hardware devices.
> Before Android, you could write a Windows Mobile app and have it run pretty much on every Windows Mobile device and the same with Blackberry and iPhones.
Considering that Android pre-dates the iPhone (and thus iOS), the statement isn't accurate. This article cites 2004 and the iPhone didn't debut until the middle of 2007. It was indeed a nightmare, not only in the development process but in distribution. Good luck getting your app widely distributed across platforms/countries/carriers.
I remember being at CES around this time and the Google guys did a keynote where they made it a mission to get rid of all the different charging standards in use at the time (every phone was different, remember having to find a charger that worked for your phone?). It was a whole different game back then.
Note that 2007 is the iPhone's public debut. The project was started in 2004 [1]. Android the product was also announced in 2007, after the iPhone, although the project indeed started before the iPhone, in 2003 [2].
There weren't a lot of Windows Mobile devices. What usually happened back then was an app would get written once, then outsourcing companies would be hired to port it to the 50 popular feature phones or whatever that made the majority of the market.
Did windows mobile ever really have a wide variance in hardware types, e.g. phone size devices vs. tablet sized devices? It was my understanding that windows mobile targeted certain screen resolutions (that or those resolutions were the only ones manufacturers were producing) and that was pretty much it.
This is clearly the comment of someone who has not used Android recently, and only occasionally reads articles about what is going on in the space. Enjoy your koolaid...
>So I think we owe Google some congratulations.
Before Android, you could write a Windows Mobile app and have it run pretty much on every Windows Mobile device and the same with Blackberry and iPhones.
The biggest problem with Android is that the OEMs and carriers abuse the open nature to make their own custom skins which are not compatible with updates. Google did not take a hard line on this like, say, Windows Phone did