In Android you don't have to support any device you don't want to, just exclude it from being shown to those users. Same with the OS version, if you don't want to support 1.6 you can make it unavailable to those users.
Most apps don't have fragmentation problems unless you're doing something tricky and hardware dependent, like trying to do fancy things with the camera. I've released several semi-popular apps with few bug complaints.
Finally, the author's link to one badly voted Reddit comment with little discussion made me think he was just out to write an Android bashing article as link bait.
In Android you don't have to support any device you don't want to, just exclude it from being shown to those users.
This will:
1) Be quite tricky due to the sheer number of devices making it difficult to test everywhere.
2) Only supporting those you know to work isn't viable due to the amount of fragmentation.
Most apps don't have fragmentation problems unless you're doing something tricky and hardware dependent
How about reading from a zipped resource on storage? (10x slower on Galaxy S, in some circumstances, due to filesystem bugs)
How about doing an SQL query with a JOIN? (100x slower, in some circumstances, on pre-2.3 devices due to a query optimizer bug in the SQLite version they ship)
Showing a splash screen? (Top cut off on Samsung devices running Gingerbread, nowhere else. Still tracing the reason)
Finally, the author's link to one badly voted Reddit comment with little discussion made me think he was just out to write an Android bashing article as link bait.
That's a valid criticism. The author found one person that didn't want to pay a dollar, and a few hundred calling him out on being stupid.
Can we get more income comparisons between popular apps on iOS and Android? That's the real data.
Fragmentation is not that bad of a problem because the distribution is far from even: you can still support most (as in 90%+) with just a handful of types. You van also restrict support by limiting the minimum OS version. The 707 devices supported cover more than 90% of the devices used.
The article is linkbait. And less than stellar journalism. Looks like someone had to fill the weekly quota of articles and took the easy option.
But it's a bad comparison.
Instead of bashing we should be thankful for the choices.
I can't read about this so called fragmentation anymore, it's ridiculously overblown, seriously.
First of all, Android provides are really good set of APIs to make the development of apps really easy across multple devices with very different hardwars specs.
There may be device specific bugs, but well.. That's business as usual.
If you guys are all for comparison, than write an Android program for 1 device(and test for it) and compare it to the iphone version.
Comparison is really flawed with iOS vs Android, it's stupid.
Also, it's not like iOS apps are bugfree. I have seen enough bugs on my iPad to say that general app quality is not as different as people claim.
In Android you don't have to support any device you don't want to, just exclude it from being shown to those users. Same with the OS version, if you don't want to support 1.6 you can make it unavailable to those users.
Most apps don't have fragmentation problems unless you're doing something tricky and hardware dependent, like trying to do fancy things with the camera. I've released several semi-popular apps with few bug complaints.
If you look at Temple Run in Play you will see it is very highly rated and it has over a million downloads. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.imangi.tem...
Finally, the author's link to one badly voted Reddit comment with little discussion made me think he was just out to write an Android bashing article as link bait.