I only deal with iOS, so excuse my ignorance, however the following statement from the article is puzzling:
"While Android fragmentation is increasing, the development time for developers is not."
Because earlier in the article it states this:
"Whenever we have a new release we spend about four hours testing the new build on all the devices. In total we estimate the extra effort of fixing device or vendor specific crashes to add 10% to our development time."
So it seems a bit inconsistent. If there is more fragmentation, then that 10% development time figure would necessarily have to increase.
I would be interested in the data demonstrating the cost-benefit analysis of supporting the high fragmentation as opposed to just supporting the the OS version with the highest penetration. I'm not arguing either way, but it would be interesting to see the effect on revenue. My hypothesis is that older OSes would likely result in less revenue (than newer OSes), so the question would be if the revenue would exceed the percentage of development cost dedicated to the particular OS in question. I really have no idea.
i think they are saying there is fragmentation, but they can effectively group the different fragments into this much smaller list of buckets by the 5 major versions and the 3 screen size ranges. that leads to 15 possibly combinations, ( although i doubt an android 2.2 phone will have a big screen size and so on... ) So until a new major category comes out they still have there 10-15 "groups" of devices to test...
You also have early adopter syndrome where people who know about fragmentation assume you won't support their phone, even if you do, even if you later add support.
Oh, $app? I heard about $app but it didn't support my phone on launch day, so I ignored them and installed a competitor who works everywhere. Oh, $app added support for my phone 6 months ago? Who cares, I've had $competitor installed for 7 months.
Comments
I only deal with iOS, so excuse my ignorance, however the following statement from the article is puzzling:
"While Android fragmentation is increasing, the development time for developers is not."
Because earlier in the article it states this:
"Whenever we have a new release we spend about four hours testing the new build on all the devices. In total we estimate the extra effort of fixing device or vendor specific crashes to add 10% to our development time."
So it seems a bit inconsistent. If there is more fragmentation, then that 10% development time figure would necessarily have to increase.
I would be interested in the data demonstrating the cost-benefit analysis of supporting the high fragmentation as opposed to just supporting the the OS version with the highest penetration. I'm not arguing either way, but it would be interesting to see the effect on revenue. My hypothesis is that older OSes would likely result in less revenue (than newer OSes), so the question would be if the revenue would exceed the percentage of development cost dedicated to the particular OS in question. I really have no idea.
i think they are saying there is fragmentation, but they can effectively group the different fragments into this much smaller list of buckets by the 5 major versions and the 3 screen size ranges. that leads to 15 possibly combinations, ( although i doubt an android 2.2 phone will have a big screen size and so on... ) So until a new major category comes out they still have there 10-15 "groups" of devices to test...
You also have early adopter syndrome where people who know about fragmentation assume you won't support their phone, even if you do, even if you later add support.
Oh, $app? I heard about $app but it didn't support my phone on launch day, so I ignored them and installed a competitor who works everywhere. Oh, $app added support for my phone 6 months ago? Who cares, I've had $competitor installed for 7 months.