[X-Istence]

And these numbers are the reason why Android development is going to be a royal pain in the butt for a long time to come.

There is just no incentive for Google to change the developer tools to be more developer friendly, to be more powerful when developers are forced to release an Android application simply because it is the platform with the most users on it. Despite the fact that from a development standpoint it is a nightmare due to differing hardware/software to the point that shops that want to develop for Android have to have 30+ devices just for physically testing. The Android emulator is absolute crap because of timing difference a bug can manifest itself in the emulator and not on the phone and vice-versa.

Not only that but the quality of applications on Android devices is simply not up to par with the quality of the same applications on the iPhone. It says a lot when Twitter and Facebook wholesale take their UI designs/decisions and put them on Android devices from their iPhone counterparts.

[psychotik]

Amen. I wish they also included how many different variants of Android were actually being shipped, and what version each one was. _Those_ numbers would make us developers tremble.

With iOS, it's simple -- if a million iOS devices were activated today, I'd know they all ran the exact same version of iOS 5.x, and none were customized or bastardized by OEMs. At least on that front, I'm thankful to Apple (I can write a whole other rant about iOS' crappiness too, but that's not relevant here)

PS: Here's an example of how Android EMs screw over apps/devs: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5358014/android-httpclien...

[X-Istence]

I recently read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3362072 a post by user "calloc" which I find quite interesting. I personally work for Absio Corp (http://absio.com/) and we do Android development for the DoD and we too have found many of the issues that I've mentioned above and that calloc has found as well. At the moment we are testing on the Evo 4G, Photon 4G, Samsung Galaxy S II, and the Droid X, with a couple of other devices mixed in. I believe we also got a new Galaxy Nexus that we are testing on.

It's a pain, and we've had issues with bugs only cropping up on one device but not another (even if they have the same Android version).

[babebridou]

The current strategy for android is to keep pushing the device level up through app developers rather than through carriers. I'm now at a point where I do all my devs targetting Ice Cream Sandwich and including the compatibility packages for older versions. This does not fix all of the fragmentation you're referring to yet, but it's a very definitive step forward. Of course, this essentially means that potentially all my apps are carrying the same patch of the OS with them...

Anyway about 80% of my previous fragmentation issues were solved with ICS. The remaining 20% though, are the truly hard ones!

[discreteevent]

Heh, maybe its fragmented android that will accelerate the dominance of the mobile web.