Fragmentation

So, I really enjoyed this post about Android fragmentation. I get increasingly frustrated seeing people whining about fragmentation without truly understanding what they mean / what the actual impact is. They also tend to ignore that this is a cost introduced along with the benefit you get from a broad range of devices - if you want to reduce fragmentation you’re more than welcome to cut down your device support in your manifest.

What’re the views of other devs on here? Have you run into major fragmentation issues in your work?

I tend to agree. The only app I’ve had major fragmentation issues with is the Fake iPhone app. But this is more of a special case, because I’m trying to graphics that don’t scale well for different screen shapes, and quite honestly I haven’t done a lot of QA on that app at all.

The word “fragmentation” seems to have become a bit of a buzzword, that doesn’t really mean much anymore. Most of the time I’ll just ignore any article using that word in the headline. Sure, there are issues caused by the wide range of devices running Android. But it’s simply part of the platform - in some ways, by design. Google could have chosen to create “another Apple” and lock things down, but they didn’t.

compared with the old J2ME days fragmentation is very low, I would say. In those days every device had some special issues, other bugs in the J2ME implementation and every manufactorer had its own ideas about haedware buttons and so on…

I had to spent hours and hours of device testing. Now there is more or less one implementation of Android and every device must have touch support. That makes things easier…