Two years ago I declared that Android’s supposed “fragmentation problem” was overblown.
I was working on Glassboard when I wrote that post, and Glassboard hadn’t become a Google Play “staff pick” yet so it still had a fairly small audience. These days I work on WordPress for Android which has a much larger audience, so I figured I’d revisit the fragmentation topic.
I’ve seen a lot more fragmentation-related problems since working on WordPress, but I still maintain that fragmentation is less of an issue than is commonly believed.
That’s not to say, of course, that it isn’t a problem at all.
I think the biggest problem is that unless your app is relatively new, you probably have to continue supporting Android 2.3. Making sure your app works on that ugly, buggy OS is a massive pain. Every Android developer I know will dance in the streets the day they can drop support for pre-ICS versions of Android.
Another problem is the number of inexpensive, low-powered Android devices in use – especially outside the US. If you want your apps to run well on them, you have to be extra-cautious about memory consumption and performance (but then, you should be anyway).
Overall, though, I haven’t found the number of devices to be as big an issue as the number of OS versions. Here’s a breakdown of the different Android versions our customers are running:
This isn’t as big a deal as you might think, but it’s not unusual to find your app works flawlessly on the latest version of Android yet breaks on a previous version due to a bug fixed between releases. The Android Issue Tracker is a big help in these situations.
The only other oft-recurring problem I’ve encountered is differences between phone and tablet versions of your app, but these are usually self-inflicted (often caused by having too many screen-specific layouts and not synching changes between them).
I’m sure these issues look horrific to iOS developers, who are blessed by only needing to support a few devices and OS versions. But they’re certainly not as horrific as the press often makes fragmentation sound, and they’re far easier to deal with than all the fragmentation problems I encountered back when I developed for Windows.