[sjhcockrell]

The fragmentation is fairly significant, given that 85% of current Android devices are still running 2.2-2.3.x versions of the Android OS--both of which are now 2 years old.[1]

Four months ago, we were experimenting with a combination of PhoneGap and mobile website versions of an app, and that was an unholy nightmare of bugs--not because of the version of Android, but because of the custom UI that phone manufacturers added on top of the stock OS.

We got three different Android devices (running 2.2, 2.3, and 4.1), and debugging for presentation, rendering, and behavioral issues was pretty painful. Two bugs that I can recall off the top of my head are:

* the "HTC Duplicate Input Bug", where the browser inserted a second <input> or <textarea> element on top of the original element in the DOM when you apply focus to a text input element and bring up the soft keyboard

* issues with heavy caching and cookie management that resulted in failed logins (depending on the user's device) and unpredictable rollout of new versions of CSS and JS

The problem with Android fragmentation is not necessarily that it's spread across the number of devices and versions; it's that the phone manufacturers have incentives to continue using legacy versions of the software (2.2-2.3x) because they have already invested time and resources into building their proprietary UI on top of them.

[1]: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...