Android fragmentation: one developer encounters 3,997 devices!

[garyopa]

Fragmentation charted in minute detail...



A chart compiled by Open Signal Maps put together data taken from 681,900 users of its app over the past six months, and saw it running on nearly 4,000 different types of devices...

A chart compiled by Open Signal Maps, put together data taken from 681,900 users of its app over the past six months, and saw it running on nearly four thousand different types of devices!!

However, looks like the actual number is much lower given that devices with custom ROMs report their identities a bit differently.

The developers logged 3,997 distinct devices, the most popular of which was the Samsung Galaxy S II. This figure was inflated quite a bit by custom ROMs, which overwrite the android.build.MODEL variable and cause those phones to be logged as separate devices. 1,363 types were logged only once, and while some were custom ROMs bucking the numbers, a good few were just massively unpopular devices—for example, the Hungarian 10.1-inch Concorde Tab.

It's not only the sheer count of devices that's daunting, either—the spread is also intimidating. It's easy to imagine a practical Android developer who doesn't want to waste time supporting niche devices restricting the app to require high-end hardware and recent APIs, covering only the 25 or so most popular phones, and devil take the hindmost. But in OpenSignalMaps' case, the top 25 devices don't even encompass half of the map, and would still exclude well-known and popular (if old) models like the Samsung Nexus S. The developers would be missing out on over 50 percent of the Android market.

Seems that, in total, 599 brands were logged (also thrown by custom ROMs a bit). Also, a "YouWave" brand is visualized, which is an Android emulator for Windows.

You can check the full chart at the official OpenSignalMaps website below.

OFFICIAL SITE: http://opensignalmaps.com/reports/fragmentation.php

NEWS SOURCE: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/...-3997-devices/

Our thanks to 'Gauss' for this news story!

[msanchez]

Yeah it's not SO bad I think. The reasons for the variety are probably custom roms, the win emulator, android x-86, and device spoofing (this is so apps that don't normally appear in the market show up). In the end, whatever actual number you get you should divide by, at least, 4; all major carriers receive a version of a phone (and also a unbranded unlocked version in most cases). Most of the time all of these different versions are identical hardware wise.

[Cyber Akuma]

It's easy to imagine a practical Android developer who doesn't want to waste time supporting niche devices restricting the app to require high-end hardware and recent APIs, covering only the 25 or so most popular phones, and devil take the hindmost. But in OpenSignalMaps' case, the top 25 devices don't even encompass half of the map, and would still exclude well-known and popular (if old) models like the Samsung Nexus S. The developers would be missing out on over 50 percent of the Android market.

Dosen't this "issue" exist with practically everything? Even iOS and mac computers? My Mac Mini can't go beyond Snow Leopard and there are apps that can't really function on an iPod touch that is older than a 4 (need a camera) or any iPod (need GPS or other such capibility). Likewise, some games won't run on older iPhones either.

Technology advances, you can't support bottom-end hardware forever. My laptop and mac mini, due to their integrated graphics, coulden't even run most games that were avaliable at their time. Yet, there are new games like Tochlight or League of Legends that run on them due to specifically being designed to be low end. If we never excluded weaker devices computer games would still look like they belong on the Commodore64.

It already happens on iOS and happens on Android as well, why is this made up issue a problem with Android only exactly? Does Windows not run on trillions of possible hardware and software configurations?