[TrainedMonkey]

I do not dispute that. I agree that it is a manageable situation. What I was pointing out is sheer scale of it. Given enough effort it is certainly possible to make any app to work on all android platforms. However, there are millions of apps in the play store and it is not possible to make them all to work on every device. I just think Google should be actively working to make that task easier on developers. For example getting cloud emulators or even physical devices available to developers for testing their apps against with automated framework.

[pjmlp]

How is that any different to make it work on the hardware configurations of all PCs ?

[TrainedMonkey]

I agree that in general situations are quite similar, however there are few differences:

1. PC never had a singular point of access to nearly all available applications. Play store makes it easy to download/install or distribute a new application making it instantly available to large amount of people.

2. It is fairly easy following a tutorial to create a new mobile app. This combined with 1 makes it easy even for relatively inexperienced people to make apps that reach wide audience.

3. Rigidity of mobile environment. On PC if something goes wrong you have a chance to figure it out and correct a problem. This is much harder on mobile, often times only thing you could do is complain to the developer.

4. No POSIX. On PC if you need an app to work across a wide array of software and hardware configurations POSIX got your back. Granted, this is a weaker point because it would work only on a limited set of operating systems that are POSIX compatible.

5. You can install almost any app from play store on nearly any android device. You can't install mac os app on windows.

[pjmlp]

1. Magazines with tapes, floppies, CDs, DVDs

2. BASIC, Logo, Hypercard, ...

3. Fail to see the difference

4. POSIX only covers a tiny bit of OS portability and even POSIX leaves the little bit it covers with lots of vendor specific behaviors

5. You can install any Mac app on any Mac, any Amiga app on any Amiga, any PC app on any PC, ...

[bane]

6. The 8-bit microcomputer madness. How many pieces of software were ported to half a dozen or more platforms?

[FigBug]

It's not. Except Windows has 95% of the market and the Mac had 5% of the market. So even though it's easier and cheaper to support a Mac app, the market is so much smaller it's still not really worth it.

Compare to mobile where iOS market place was leading, it didn't make a lot of sense to spend more effort on the smaller market.

Now the Android market is about equal, you are still spending more effort to make the same money.

[pjmlp]

> Except Windows has 95% of the market and the Mac had 5% of the market.

Except you are forgetting, screen resolution, processor speed, graphics card, sound card, co-processor, printer type, scanner type, microphone, webcam, harddisk, network card, modem, ...

[mgkimsal]

Way back in the day it was pretty common for people to swap out pieces of a system (not too much today except for gamers).

Your system needs a bigger screen? Get a bigger monitor and/or graphics card. Need a faster modem? Buy one. Need a camera? Add it.

Go upgrade the graphics chip in your Android 2.3 handset. Oh wait...

[pjmlp]

That doesn't have anything to do with the complaint about Android's fragmentation.

[mgkimsal]

you're pointing out 'fragmentation' in the windows market because of all the varying hardware, and it seemed you were saying it was equivalent to the android world. it's not, because you generally could change hardware on a windows system, but not on an android device.

[eloisant]

Well, no, Android market share is not equal to iPhone. It's much, much more.