[on_and_off]

I work on an Android app aimed at the North American market.

Android O, P and Q are 88% of our Android devices. By far and large, fragmentation is something I _never_ have to think about.

Jetpack libraries are here to handle it for us, as an abstraction layer between the OS and third party apps.

I would have mentioned that e.g. camera apps are an exception : here hardware fragmentation can be a pain. I was half surprised to see that Google is also working on that one with the camera x library.

There have been cases where the fragmentation bites us; and there might be in the future (although in all fainess my iOS colleagues sometimes have to create specific fixes as well) but the last time I had to scratch my head because of a device specific bug was years ago.

And at the time, I was already finding these articles deeply ridiculous.

[blihp]

It sounds like you're rolling with whatever Google's latest 'solution' to fragmentation is, so of course it's not going to be an issue: Google is dropping old devices for you so they never even appear in your console stats.[1] This is a perfectly valid business decision to take on your end, but it doesn't mean that the problem doesn't still exist... only that you aren't having to deal with it. I've got several still functional 4.x-5.x devices (thanks to stellar upgrade policies) that can't even use the market anymore (so much for compatibility libraries being the solution)[2] I've also done Android development and years ago stopped believing that the real solution they have to offer is anything other than throw your devices away after a few years. Me bitter? Only when I read posts saying fragmentation is a solved problem on Android ;-)

[1] You say that O/P/Q are 88% of your devices but they only represent 38.7% of devices accessing the market (Q doesn't even show up) per https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards. Likely the solution Google has provided ignores a significant chunk of devices out there. When they announce these new initiatives, they tend to support the most widely-used and recent devices while quietly ignoring the rest. A valid strategy, but hardly comprehensive. (yeah, yeah... this time is different)

[2] Technically, they can still access the market, they just can't download anything. Probably either some web API breakage or no longer supported version of something on the device.

[dmix]

> but they only represent 38.7% of devices accessing the market

He said he targets North America. Those stats you referenced are global.

If he was supporting parts of Asia, Latin America, etc then I have a feeling his team would have to be more careful.

[blihp]

Point taken that the U.S./Canada stats likely skew to more recent versions. However, I'm in the U.S. and several of my devices couldn't possibly even download his company's app. Granted, I'm an outlier and tend to use my devices until they die. (they are actually still pretty useful around-the-house devices and can browse the web, watch videos, play some older games etc. Maybe I'll fire up a couple of them and open the Play app just to nudge the stats by a few millionths of a percent. ;-)

[radley]

That's not unique to Android. I still use an old iPad 3 (stuck on iOS 9) for movies & audiobooks in bed. I can still use Netflix, Plex, & Audible because I downloaded them a long time ago. But I recently switched to 1Password and I can't install it on that iPad.

[ryandrake]

I don’t think iPad 3 is even “old”. I have an original iPad 1, and the situation is even worse: I’m frozen in time on iOS 5, and the device has been losing app availability for years. Without jail breaking, it can basically only do what was installed with it from the factory. The hardware itself outlasts most companies’ software support by 2-4X. I see a bleak future of millions of perfectly usable devices that are only unusable because developers decided to stop keeping their software compatible.

Contrast that with the world of PCs where I can still run recent versions of Linux on devices 10-20 years old.

[Const-me]

> where I can still run recent versions of Linux on devices 10-20 years old.

10 sure, but not 20. 20 years ago the devices had 32 bit CPUs, the support for them is being phased out. The last 32-bit Ubuntu LTS is 16.04.6, from 2016.

[eecc]

That’s what happened with desktop PCs when design progress (or deliberate gradualism some would say) obsoleted machines over the course of several months.

Same happened with mobile devices, where designers and manufacturers were looking for the ideal recipe of a mobile phone.

[simonh]

Can you still access the App Store? A few years ago in 2017 I found my old iPhone 3GS in a drawer. I fired it up and it still connected to the App Store, and I was able to download some apps I'd bought back in the day. Even some apps that hadn't been updated or available for newer devices for years, including Lemonade Stand, an old favourite. It was great seeing my kinds play that on my old Phone.

I got my daughter a newer device later that year, so don't know if it still works. I've lost track of it again.

[signal11]

According to 1Password's support forum, "1Password 6 supports 1Password.com accounts, and that will run on iOS 9 and 10"[1].

The iPad 3 was quite problematic as a device in that it was very RAM- and CPU-limited. With a 1GHz dual-core A9 and 1GB RAM, it was not going to handle future iOS updates well.

The next version, the 2012 iPad, runs iOS 10 and is still useful -- I still have one lying around for when I need an iPad (and I do have 1Password on it). And the 2013 iPad Air runs the latest iOS and I expect this to continue as iPad tech plateaus.

Lack of OS updates isn't unique to Android, but Android manufacturers collectively have a very blasé attitude to updates, much worse than Apple and Microsoft.

[1] https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/comment/408090/...

[_Codemonkeyism]

Same here.

[on_and_off]

>It sounds like you're rolling with whatever Google's latest 'solution' to fragmentation

> You say that O/P/Q are 88% of your devices but they only represent 38.7% of devices accessing the market

NO !!

That's the issue with these articles. They just read the android dashboard and pretend that:

- it applies everywhere

- many different devices = difficulty for the devs or users

The dashboard reports the global figures. These figures are heavily skewed by third world countries where old versions of Android are still shipping.

"The market" ... this is absolutely meaningless. If you work for let's say Lyft, the market is wherever lyft can operate, that's not the whole world, so whatever the Android version dashboard tells is meaningless for you or your users.

For our market 88% of the users are O or superior. 6 months ago we stopped supporting devices older than lollipop for this particular app (IIRC it was because they don't support TLS 1.3 and it was giving us some security concerns). For the app I worked on before, we had legacy apks : apks that are still distributed on the play store but that we don't maintain. Basically when we decided to stop "supporting" an old Android version. And by old; I mean Android Eclair; this was a pretty popular app with tons of users on various devices. So we take our current app that still support that old API level. We make sure that it is as stable as we can get it (since we always launch new features, we always have new corner cases, we make sure these are handled). And when it is ok; we set this apk as a legacy one on the play store : if you have one of these old Android versions, you are going to be able to continue using or even installing that older apk. Technically we can update it if we want to, but unless there is suddenly a wave of crashes or complaints we just leave it be.

Even for that app, the figures were roughly the same (and that's while being available in 150 countries, that was for a pretty popular app). For these legacy apks, we often had something like 10k installs, while the main app is in the dozens of millions (but since that app had a paid subscription, make the service work even for old device was a must do).

And yeah, even for that job where we had an app available on API 7+ (Android 2.3 eclair IIRC), the figures were still pretty similar and fragmentation was something I read about in stupid articles, not a part of my daily job. I am not working for Google, if I had to solve fragmentation issues everyday, I would be the first to complain about it. I am here to build an app, not maintain random OEMs hacks.

[p1necone]

This reminds me of browser usage stats showing that x% of people are still using IE 6 or whatever. In reality a huge number of those are probably web crawlers or malware or something spoofing it's browser id.

[izuchukwu]

I believe in the comment you’re replying to, “the market” is actually referring to the Android Market, the original name of the Google Play Store, rather than the economic market of serviceable users.

[on_and_off]

ah, I see.

It still misses the whole point though.

Again, the global numbers are pretty meaningless for app developers.

Even if your app is called gmail, at some point you will see that you have 0.01% of your users on a very old version of Android. And you are not going to cut them off, just freeze an apk that will be their last version.

And for almost all apps, your useage stats won't look like these global numbers.

We are doing everything we can to increase our user numbers .. if it meant lowering the min supported version, we would do it but it is just not something that would help us.

[Fradow]

> I've got several still functional 4.x-5.x devices [...] that can't even use the market anymore

4.4.x and 5.x can certainly use the Play Store. I use both of those versions regularly, and they still works well (in fact, I keep 4.4.x support, and do not plan on stopping soon).

In Europe, a few manufacturers still sell 5.x devices. In particular, my manufacturer of choice only recently decided to finally upgrade the small tablet / low cost option to give us the chance of having an OS that's not 5 years old on purchase /sarcasm.

May I mention that contrary to iPads, older devices allow to side-load older app versions (that you can easily find online). I recently re-used a 4.0.2 device and installed VLC and Firefox on it (all it will ever need). And for 4.2+, you can just use F-Droid, most apps are going to be compatible.

[pjmlp]

My Asus Lolipop Tablet (Aka Android 5.x) can certainly use the market.

Just like the "deal of the day" ones that are still being sold across German consumer stores at shopping malls.

[muxator]

Out of curiosity: did you ever tried using Yalp store for downloading the apk from the store? Would it be useful for you?

[blihp]

No and probably not. I have newer devices too, I was just using my older devices to make the point that the fragmentation problem hasn't been solved as much as it's been swept under the carpet.

[mattlondon]

+1 I have a few hobby apps on the app store that gave had a few thousand downloads. Not a huge sample but generally speaking it's N+ that has the vast majority of users. My apps are fairly standard or are games - most API levels since M seem to basically cover everything I need 99% of the time.

I have no interest AT ALL in the manufacturer of the device.

Fragmentation simply doesn't feel like an issue, at least to me.

[Avamander]

Fragmentation becomes an issue when you're either building services that run in the background or interact with hardware (BT, WiFi, WiFi-direct, Camera, GNSS, Gyro/Accel). I feel fragmentation hard with my app.

[on_and_off]

For the background WorkManager has done wonders.

For hardware, I believe that 100%. I am talking about "regular" android apps that don't need deep access to the hardware. By deep I mean something harder than recording something (e.g. taking/picking a picture is delegated to the default system app, not the one you build) or displaying the current position with a mapping sdk.

Bluetooth in particular I can believe. It is amazingly complex and adding the OEMs customizations on top must be a total pain.

[pjmlp]

On ADB Podcast about Bluetooth, they referred that certain models would just crash if someone tries to talk with specific protocol versions.

[megy]

I mean, what? You are like a local store with foot traffic complaining about the global internet restrictions. Of course it doesn't affect you.

[threeseed]

Fragmentation is an issue if you're at an enterprise or building a mass market product however.

Then you can't just ignore large percentages of the market.

[on_and_off]

One of my previous job was for one of the big music streaming services.

So very much a mass market product :)

As stated above, what we did was that when we decided to "drop support" for an API level, what it meant was that we would freeze an apk that would be delivered to these older devices and have a higher min api level for the new app versions.

The burden might higher on the backend people not to break the old endpoints than for us.. these old apks need to continue working. Technically we were supporting these frozen legacy apks, but since we have chosen particularly stable app releases for this, in practice we never touched them.

Weird corner cases/devices were indeed a bit more of a concern. And to be explicit, that was never a significant amount of our time. I was part of the more senior team that had to (among many other things) deal with that, and I don't think it has been more than 5% of my time (and 5% of the time of 2 other colleagues, whereas the 20 others not in our team did not have to deal with it at all).

As far as I can tell it is the result of :

- at this scale, if something can break, it will break. when you have millions of daily users, all of your app issues will be uncovered (and to be honest, there was a ton of these... we inherited some very awful code in some crucial areas)

- mass market means that you will see all kind of devices connecting to your service, including weird no names chinese devices that have not been certified by google. So they did not have to pass the compatibility test suite that devices shipping with the play store have to satisfy. This has been getting better and better year after year but at first you could see some "exotic" behaviors.

- mass market also means that people will try everything in order to use your product for free. Although to be honest 99% are refreshingly naive. Like somebody distributing a "cracked" apk letting you get one month of premium for free. We decompiled that version and could not figure out what had changed .... until we tried it and.. oh man, so that "hack" is just that we we offering a one month free trial at that time .. Nothing nefarious here, just the same free month you would have gotten for a new account by downloading the official apk from the play store.

[throw03172019]

I’ve been doing iOS since 2008 and the “specific fixes” are definitely more common these days! iOS used to be a simple platform with one standard phone size and tablet size but it started to increase in complexity with all the new devices today (I’m looking at you iPhone X). iOS 6 -> iOS 7-8 was such a pain to main backward compatibility because of all the navigation/status bar changes.

I still find iOS to be my preferred platform but the “it just works” feeling is no longer there.

[kitsunesoba]

In my experience, iOS is still pretty close to, “it just works” if one sticks to recommended practices (autolayout, etc). Not perfect, but not bad either.

Of course if you’re writing manual frame code or using some third party UI library, that’s a very different story…

[keerthiko]

If your app primarily requires:

- native UI elements (labels, text fields, images, listviews, etc)

- images in any standard format (png, jpeg, etc)

- network requests that doesn't fetch more than a few 100kb of data at a time

- simple touch interaction (single item tap/drag/swipe/slide)

- read/write to internal storage

- play audio

...then you're fine and fragmentation is most likely a non-issue. OTOH, if you require

- openGL or 3D graphics calls

- read/write to removable storage

- video streaming, HLS streaming, or even local video file playback

- downloads/network fetches of larger amounts of files/data

- multi-touch UX

- rear and/or front or any specific camera access

- actually any hardware sensor/broadcaster/receiver access (gyro, accel, flashlight, bluetooth)

- OS manipulation (custom keyboard, replace default telephony/texting, modify native modals such as share view, register with the OS as a share-target, etc)

...then enjoy lopping off a chunk of your userbase (which you may have to specify manually, although Google helps with this) or struggling to write lots of OS detection switch statements with custom logic for handling each of these things. Working on an app that does 4+ of the things from the latter list, Android fragmentation has been and will continue to be a problem, even if it isn't really at any given point.

If we just want apps which move blobs of text back and forth between views and across the network, then yes fragmentation is not an issue.

[orangecat]

camera apps are an exception : here hardware fragmentation can be a pain

Yes. The backwards sensors in the Nexus 5x and 6 were particularly amusing/irritating: https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9696774/google-nexus-5x-u....

[alkonaut]

The Q is of course: how many do you need to support. This is the same as with browsers. If you have to code for blind people using IE6 with JS off, you are coding for the lowest common denominator. This happens.

If you can just code for "The 90% with a reasonably modern browser, at least one working eye and JS enablded" then you are in a different situation.

Fragmentation hurts the people in the first camp that need to support 99% or more, for example if you are coding an app for a government service and not for a startup.

[clumsysmurf]

> I would have mentioned that e.g. camera apps are an exception : here hardware fragmentation can be a pain. I was half surprised to see that Google is also working on that one with the camera x library.

The irony, is that Android was originally designed to be a Camera OS. So its still fragmented in the thing it set out to do.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2034723/android-founder-we-a...

[ac29]

That's taken way out of context - according to your linked article, Android was pitched as a Camera OS in 2004, but almost immediately changed gears to an "open-source handset solution" a few months later that year. This was still years before iPhone was announced.

[megy]

Sure. Plenty of people can ignore the cheaper devices. But if you work for a government agency, you may not be able to. Or a bank. Or a utility. Or a telecom provider. Or a 1000 other businesses.

[matwood]

It's been awhile since I've done Android development, but are you including the Kindle devices in your numbers? Best I can tell the latest FireOS is based on Nougat.

[sonnyblarney]

"O, P and Q are 88% of our Android devices" - this is problematic because you're therefore serving only a fraction of the market.

A considerably number of companies have to actually deal with this fragmentation, for example, we have a product that integrates with a device via Blutooth, and we have to deal with this issue. We can't just 'not serve' a bunch of customers.

[milleramp]

“e.g. camera apps are an exception”

This is a huge exception that suppresses third party innovation.

[bluescrn]

Try doing anything vaguely graphical (games being the obvious example) and you’ll realise that a large percentage of Android devices are potatoes