Android Fragmentation in Cold Hard Numbers
By: Hillel Fuld
The much talked about ongoing battle between Apple and Google, or more accurately, iOS and Android is heating up. Verizon is launching the iPhone in a few weeks, which will double the amount of iPhones on the US market and is sure to give a nice boost to the bottom line market share numbers. There are countless Android tablets coming out over the next few months that are expected to give the iPad a run for its money.
However, despite the advances Google has made with Android, the fragmentation issue, which has been there from almost day one, is still very much alive and kickin. If you have been anywhere near the Web in the last few weeks, you have surely heard of the new questions and answers site, Quora. Well, a recent Quora thread, which was a reply to the question “What proportion of iPhone users use iOS4 today?” shed some serious light on the very worrisome Android numbers.
According to the CEO of Bump, their statistics show that 90% of iPhone users are using the latest iOS4 version. Now, let’s compare that to Android 2.3, running on the Nexus S, which is the latest Android update. Can you guess what percentage of Android users are using 2.3? The answer is 0.4%! Now, it is true that 2.3 is only running on the Nexus S, but that is part of the problem. Why aren’t all Android phones, or at least the top devices such as the Galaxy S line, running 2.3? That, my friend, is what’s called fragmentation.
MG Siegler makes a good point when he says that it is unfair to compare iOS 4 to Android 2.3 and so he compares it to 2.2, an OS that has been around since way before iOS4. So what percentage of Android users are using 2.2 compared to the 90% of iOS4 users? 51.8%! Not good, Google, not good at all.
So, how does this happen and why is it a problem? It happens because manufacturers are releasing devices with old Android OSs in order to lure users to buy the next best thing that they release. In fact, over 10% of Android users are still stuck on Android 1.5, an OS that is four generations old.
What is also funny is that Google is already teasing us with Android 3.0 for tablets and as we said above, the vast majority of Android users have not yet experienced 2.3. It’s a mess.
Why is this a problem? From a developer’s perspective, it means you are going to have to develop a few versions of your Android app. One for each OS and its features. Add to that the fact that each Android device has a different size screen and very different capabilities, and you have yourself a developer’s worst nightmare.
From a user’s perspective, this fragmentation problem causes confusion and problems when some apps support certain phones and do not support others because they are running an old Android OS.
The bottom line is, Android is a great mobile OS and it is advancing quickly, but if Google doesn’t somehow get a handle on this fragmentation, somewhere down the line, when it has a nice majority of the mobile market share, this is going to come back and bite them where it hurts.
So, how can Google solve this and do you think they should or is this really not as big of an issue and I am claiming. Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter.
