What a weird story.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| dinotrac Mar 20, 2012 1:21 PM EDT |
It's not that there's no merit to the fragmentation concern, but...
it seems overblown. Lots of Gingerbread things run on my Ice Cream Sandwich Transformer, and Honeycomb things even moreso. ICS and beyond will actually reduce fragmentation as phones and tables share a common platform. Lots of noise and nervous nellies over a current inconvenience. |
| ComputerBob Mar 20, 2012 2:02 PM EDT |
Quoting:Lots of Gingerbread things run on my Ice Cream Sandwich Transformer, and Honeycomb things even moreso.I prefer a Big Oatis: two big, soft oatmeal cookies with vanilla ice cream between them, and the whole thing covered in chocolate. |
| dinotrac Mar 20, 2012 2:11 PM EDT |
@cb -- Talk about bringing new meaning to fat clients! |
| BernardSwiss Mar 20, 2012 7:36 PM EDT |
Quoting: "We believe it's really because of the fragmentation that Android's experiencing," he told us, "both at the platform and OS level, but also at the monetization-model level." Ahhh... OK. Now I get it. (Not!). Clear as mud. What is that supposed to mean? What is the pertinent difference between OS and platform, here (Cell-service providers?) And most especially what is that bit about there being too much fragmentation at the "monetizatation-model level" supposed to mean -- that there's just too many ways to make money? |
| DrGeoffrey Mar 20, 2012 7:54 PM EDT |
Just another writer trying to create an issue out of thin air. Honestly, I think Fettoosh's beef regarding GTK applications under KDE has considerably more merit. Yet, look at the grief we're giving him. |
| Fettoosh Mar 23, 2012 7:28 PM EDT |
Quoting:Honestly, I think Fettoosh's beef regarding GTK applications under KDE has considerably more merit. Yet, look at the grief we're giving him. It isn't a problem, I am used to it. Not too long ago, I had lots more for defending KDE 4. |
| KernelShepard Mar 24, 2012 8:48 PM EDT |
There's a couple of problems with developing for Android (in my experience): 1. The spread of OS versions is annoying and means you need to target FroYo (up until recently, it was Eclair). The OS is changing at a very fast pace, and targeting 2.2 is really suboptimal, but you don't have much choice if you want your software to actually even work on most phones out there. 2. The test matrix is huge. Hardware * OS version * screen size * kernel bugs = nightmare. If you are a stand-alone developer, this quickly destroys incentive to develop for the platform not only because it's a lot of extra work, but also because it's very expensive to buy a wide range of devices to test on. Mozilla devs, for example, ran into an issue where Firefox wouldn't run on any of the Samsung phones for a while because Samsung distributed a buggy kernel. That was finally fixed with an update after 2.2 IIRC. That ended up biting just about everyone who used the NDK, unless they got lucky. 3. A huge % of the Android phones out there are the really low-end ones. They barely run the OS at all, let alone well. That means that the number of potential customers is but a fraction the numbers that Google likes to boast about. Sure, they're running Android, but they don't have the horsepower to run much of anything, so they don't *buy* any software. 4. Android devices like the Ainol (pronounced "Anal") are starting to make their way into the market and they are using MIPS instead of ARM. This means developers need to buy more hardware to test against and also cannot use the NDK in order to work around performance issues in Dalvik. 5. B&N and Amazon have the 2 best-selling Android tablets, and they each have their own "markets". This is just another annoyance when targeting Android. |
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