[jfoster]

You're right that there is a big difference between them for now.

We're currently seeing around one new iPhone and one new iPad coming out of Apple each year, though. Don't forget iPod Touch, by the way. Sometimes they come with new features not available to older devices. They get released with three different storage capacities, and only some of your users will have 3G/4G on their iPads. The point is that in a year or two this is going to be a worse situation even for iOS devices. It's reasonable to assume that Android fragmentation will also get worse.

Where does that leave us? Well, I think Android is taking an interesting approach. A couple of the things in the Android SDK that help deal with fragmentation: - Standard UI components (eg. Action Bar for actions/navigation, Fragments for generic slices of UI, Layouts for providing guidance on how Fragments are to be arranged on different devices and screen orientations) - They provide a support library that can be bundled with apps using features from newer OS versions so that the new features also work on devices running older versions.

[prof_hobart]

I agree it will get worse, but I don't yet see anything that suggests iOS is going to get close to the fragmentation that Android already suffers with.

Things like storage capacity and network availability are challenges, it's true. But they are things that can affect any device (you can fill up a 64GB device, and you can be in an area with no network), so they aren't really fragmentation issues unless your app requires huge storage or depends on a specific network type being available. Android by its very nature is always going to have a far wider variation than iOS. This is not necessarily a bad thing (there's more choice and more cutting edge options in Android), but it does create a fragmentation challenge of a totally different scale to iOS.