>fragmentation exists, how do we make the best of it?
>The idea that every person on the planet is going to use the same phone with the same capabilities and the same size screen is a fantasy world iOS developers live in.
There are a billion plus PCs running Windows with various hardware, screen sizes and even different form factors. Yet fragmentation is not as big a problem as on Android.
Your evidence for app incompatibility is... variant icon art and placement on a bunch of pre-ICS phones that aren't sold anymore?
I mean: it's true, Google failed to enforce a layout for the original Android buttons (Home, Menu, Back, and Search). And device manufacturers put them in different places (sometimes omitting Search entirely) and used different art, and that was bad. And Google fixed it with ICS (a year and a half ago!), which uses soft buttons exclusively. So sure, it's a valid point.
But to argue that somehow you can't write a compatible app because Samsung put the back button on the other side from Motorola is just ridiculous, sorry. Get a better example.
Microsoft required an illegal monopoly in order to obtain the incredible resources needed to certify Windows on all that hardware. And the prices were astronomical, for PCs, peripherals, etc.
>The idea that every person on the planet is going to use the same phone with the same capabilities and the same size screen is a fantasy world iOS developers live in.
There are a billion plus PCs running Windows with various hardware, screen sizes and even different form factors. Yet fragmentation is not as big a problem as on Android.
The primary problem comes with the deep customization of the OS and lack of standards, not things like screen sizes. For example, look at this http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/12/10x120...