Android Fragmentation is Everyone's Responsibility
Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 11:59AM In response to a post on Moconews by Tricia Duryee, "Will Google's Android Suffer from Fragmentation?", I'd like to highlight 3 areas most likely driving the variations in Android which will impact how the community being built around the open OS emerges:
1) UI/UX. Each market developer will not be compiling to each of the branded presentation frameworks that the OEMs use to differentiate themselves. The market is a separate set of apps appended to the interaction screens created for a particular phone.
2) Device. Each manufacturer will try to optimize the way Android runs with their combination of choices for chipset, software solutions, screen and licenses. Over time the linkage between how the market apps are informed as a whole about how to interoperate with these unique stacks may get tighter, but the 3rd party app developer may not get access to APIs directly.
3) Network. OEMs and carriers will not want to enable apps to hog resources like the “fat kid at the front of the buffet line.” Because there are variances in each carrier’s network, and testing between the OEM and the carrier before the device is certified, apps that unduly use network resources may be blocked at the device or network level through configurations that prevent it from degrading all customer experiences on that network (e.g. constantly polling the network.)
Will this de facto create fragmentation? Perhaps. But for Android to succeed at open, everyone in the value chain has to believe it is a good idea to open each layer that impacts the user experience on a particular device. I would argue that it isn’t necessarily in the best interest of the consumer to do that since many consumers I have seen with Android devices can’t tell a good app from a bad app. The messages about what the app uses are so geeky that consumers ignore them, take anything and everything onto their device, and can rapidly find themselves with a sluggish, underperforming handset that is undependable as a mobile phone.
Just like with Windows, consumers may still find they have to purchase a new device to upgrade to a newer version of Android’s OS even though their handset is capable of receiving an over the air update. If their existing device hardware is unable to support the next gen features (eg, better screen resolution, ROM size), the update just won’t come to it and they will have to buy new hardware. This is a bit of a red herring, and pretty much a fact of life with most update-able consumer electronics, but perhaps just more noticeable in the rapidly changing world of wireless devices.
Reader Comments (2)
Not exactly on topic, but a decent side detour here. I bought the Verizon Droid the day it came out. I never buy gadgets the day they come out. I just can't justify the unnecessary headaches against the "That is so cool" reaction I can elicit by being cutting edge.
What are the headaches? I've had the phone three days. No one at Verizon can answer my weekend's worth of tech questions. I have to wait a couple weeks for the blogoshphere and the discussion boards to get in front of the issues I am experiencing (nothing all that exotic, I am sure) so I can get my questions answered. I'd rather wait for the dust to settle and be second on the block to own the latest and greatest.
Meanwhile it is sitting next to me saying a very techno-sounding and extended "DROID" as a notification for each and every email. It is getting old fast. Anyone know how to shut the computer generated voice off?
It's actually not too far off topic at all. In fact, the reason you can't discover the answers is that Droid uses a specific version of Android that will run on Verizon's network, which is not the same that T-Mobile has on it's currently shipping Android phones. In fact, all 3 layers - network, OS and UI/UX - are different. It's Android 2.0 (T-Mobile is not shipping 2.0 currently), it runs on their CDMA network (T-Mobile runs GSM), and it has a new Verizon interaction design and presentation layer.
The biggest challenge in mobile today is that innovation is defining user experiences that drive new behaviors and that often can create a lot of risk for mainstream consumers to adopt new technology. That's especially true if the price someone has to pay for early adoption is they can't make a call because of a dead battery, downloading a bad developed app from the market or changing a setting they shouldn't really change.