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by bookwormAT 4976 days ago
> iOS has no fragmentation

iOS is fragmentation. Android exists because 10 years ago, every mobile vendor was making his own incompatible operating system. So a developer had to make 300 different versions of his app to reach his audience. That was impossible, so there was no market for mobile apps.

Today, there are still 300 different devices, and maybe a 100 different operating systems. But because ~95 of these are based on Android, you can write a single cross-platform software that runs on all these systems. Android was build to defragment the market, and it was a huge success.

It might not work perfectly, but adapting your App to some strange behavior in some fancy Android device is still a lot less work than making a whole new app from scratch!

The only interesting OSes that you have to write everything from scratch for today are iOS and Windows Phone. These two systems are, unlike all the others, not compatible with each other and require a significant amount of extra work. And that is called fragmentation.