It is both a real thing and laziness. With decent technical design and Google's Android support library you can pretty much code as if 98% of people run KitKat and not worry about it, the support library will fallback gracefully down to all the OS versions you do care about.
Most of the time when I hear designers complaining about Android fragmentation they are really just using "fragmentation" as a scapegoat to bemoan they fact that they can't just create a very small set (1-3) of universal "pixel perfect" mockups and ship those off as a PSD to a developer as the end-all, be-all "visual spec". They have to worry about things like how different parts of the app should scale as more real estate is made available, really understand DPI (I've met more than a few designers who shockingly don't really grasp DPI scaling), etc. Some designers are awesome at this and welcome the challenges (and benefits!) that "responsive layout" brings with it, but a lot of them (most of them, in my personal experience) just want to punt on all that shit.
> With decent technical design and Google's Android support library you can pretty much code as if 98% of people run KitKat and not worry about it
People say this. It's not really actually true.
A nice little example encountered recently. Say you have a HTTP server which uses gzip or deflate when the client asks it to. Pretty standard, right? And say you want to return a HTTP 204, or other contentless success. Seems reasonable? And if you do this on Android 4.4 using the standard HTTP client, it will work. If you do it on Android 4.1 (the most commonly-deployed version of Android), it will throw a null pointer exception deep in the library code.
This is just one of many issues. Compatibility support libraries are all very well, but they don't really help with the standard libraries being buggy, and those bugs will _never be fixed_ for the vast majority of users.
"Mika says it spent 20% of its total development time last year on the process of porting two of its games to Android and then tweaking those titles for individual devices. It could never even get Battleheart to work on Galaxy S phones, because they can't download .apk's larger than 30MB with stock software. For all the months of "thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through," Mika claims it never made a profit off either of its Android games."
Geez, I wouldn't go into Android game development after reading this. And we haven't even breached the piracy issues.
Does that really matter though? Apps which require 4.0+ still frequently have terrible design which is just an iOS clone, complete with fuzzy assets and a frustratingly iOS-centric UI.
At the same time, developers like ShiftyJelly (www.shiftyjelly.com) show that fantastic crossplatform apps can be developed which have a great Android UI and are still very similar to their iOS counterparts.
I genuinely think it is just laziness, but while users continue to put up with it (especially since Android users appear to be happy to stick with a shitty UI on a free app compared to dropping a couple of dollars on a great one), it is unlikely to change.
georgemcbay|12 years ago
Most of the time when I hear designers complaining about Android fragmentation they are really just using "fragmentation" as a scapegoat to bemoan they fact that they can't just create a very small set (1-3) of universal "pixel perfect" mockups and ship those off as a PSD to a developer as the end-all, be-all "visual spec". They have to worry about things like how different parts of the app should scale as more real estate is made available, really understand DPI (I've met more than a few designers who shockingly don't really grasp DPI scaling), etc. Some designers are awesome at this and welcome the challenges (and benefits!) that "responsive layout" brings with it, but a lot of them (most of them, in my personal experience) just want to punt on all that shit.
rsynnott|12 years ago
People say this. It's not really actually true.
A nice little example encountered recently. Say you have a HTTP server which uses gzip or deflate when the client asks it to. Pretty standard, right? And say you want to return a HTTP 204, or other contentless success. Seems reasonable? And if you do this on Android 4.4 using the standard HTTP client, it will work. If you do it on Android 4.1 (the most commonly-deployed version of Android), it will throw a null pointer exception deep in the library code.
This is just one of many issues. Compatibility support libraries are all very well, but they don't really help with the standard libraries being buggy, and those bugs will _never be fixed_ for the vast majority of users.
It gets even worse when you take OEM crap into account. Want to use the camera? You'd better know about obscure Samsung quirks: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13448731/does-samsung-gal...
runewell|12 years ago
joezydeco|12 years ago
"Mika says it spent 20% of its total development time last year on the process of porting two of its games to Android and then tweaking those titles for individual devices. It could never even get Battleheart to work on Galaxy S phones, because they can't download .apk's larger than 30MB with stock software. For all the months of "thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through," Mika claims it never made a profit off either of its Android games."
Geez, I wouldn't go into Android game development after reading this. And we haven't even breached the piracy issues.
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/03/12/mika-mobiles-decisio...
batiudrami|12 years ago
"It's too hard" or "it doesn't make enough money" are more than reasonable. A software limitation in a 5 year old device is not.
batiudrami|12 years ago
At the same time, developers like ShiftyJelly (www.shiftyjelly.com) show that fantastic crossplatform apps can be developed which have a great Android UI and are still very similar to their iOS counterparts.
I genuinely think it is just laziness, but while users continue to put up with it (especially since Android users appear to be happy to stick with a shitty UI on a free app compared to dropping a couple of dollars on a great one), it is unlikely to change.