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Hey, Did You Know That Apple’s iOS Is The Most Fragmented Of The Leading Mobile Operating Systems???
From Endgadget:
Cast your mind back to the ancient time that was this August and you’ll recall Eric Schmidt telling you, with no lack of pride, that 200,000 Android phones were being sold each and every day. Skip past Steve Jobs’ snide remarks
about what’s included in that tally, and fast-forward to today, where
Andy Rubin is blowing minds with the latest, very nicely rounded, total:
300,000 daily activations. Yes, in spite of being the most fragmented thing this side of our 10-year old hard drives, the Android OS just keeps growing at an exponential rate. So Steve, any comment on today’s data? Were they counting it wrong?
Well, to begin with… Just how fragmented is Android, really? From Phandroid, Android 2.x Running On 83% Of Devices Accessing Android Market
Android Developers released its
regular report on Android OS distribution on Android devices accessing
the Android Market in a two week period, and the number of devices
running Android 2.1 and Android 2.2 have continued to become more
prevelant than Android 1.5 and 1.6 powered devices, with Android 2.x OS
devices now account for an 83% share.
It is important to note in these latest figures that Android 2.2 has overtaken Android 2.1 since last time we reported on the distribution. In addition, the percentage of devices running Android 2.1 is less.
Guess what this means? Well, I can feel comfortable in assuming that
Apple 4.x does not run on 83% or more of the Apple mobile devices sold.
That makes Apple the “Fragmentation Title Holder”! That’s right, Apple’s
iOS is more fragmented than Android. Throw that statement into the geek
fest argument you come across and watch the nerdy fanboi sparks start
to fly.
As I guaranteed readers and subscribers over the summer in Empirical Evidence of Android Eating Apple! and More of the Android Onslaught: Increasing Handset Revenues and Growth, the truth has come to pass… From Moco News: Apple Continued To Lose U.S. Marketshare Despite Spike From iPhone ..
Apple’s iPhone 4 did not give the
company the bump in sales it needed to put Android’s momentum in check.
Instead, Apple’s smartphone marketshare in the U.S. dropped by 1.3
percent in the three months ended in July while Android’s share grew by
an impressive five percentage points, reports ComScore.
And the lead has been increased since then, see Android Continues Its March To The Number One Spot In US And Global Mobile OS Sales Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
See also:
The Creatively Destructive Pace of Technology Innovation and the Paradigm Shift known as the Mobile Computing Wars!
- There Is Another Paradigm Shift Coming in Technology and Media: Apple, Microsoft and Google Know its Winner Takes All
- The Mobile Computing and Content Wars: Part 2, the Google Response to the Paradigm Shift
- An Introduction to How Apple Apple Will Compete With the Google/Android Onslaught
- Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Ultra-Mobile Computing Wars Just Yet
- This article should drive the point home: An iPhone 4 Recall Will Hurt Apple More By Opening Additional Opportunity for Android Devices Than Increased Expenses
- A First in the Mainstream Media: Apple’s Flagship Product Loses In a Comparison Review to HTC’s Google-Powered Phone
- After Getting a Glimpse of the New Windows Phone 7 Functionality, RIMM is Looking More Like a Short Play
- RIM Smart Phone Market Share, RIP?
- Android is gaining preference as the long-term choice of application developers
- A Glimpse of the BoomBustBlog Internal Discussion Concerning the Fate of Apple
- Math and the Pace of Smart Phone Innovation May Take a Byte Out of Apple’s (Short-lived?) Dominance
- Apple on the Margin
- RIM Smart Phone Market Share, RIP?
- Motorola, the Company That INVENTED the Cellphone is Trying to Uninvent the iPad With Android
- Android Now Outselling iOS? Explaining the Game of Chess That Google Plays in the Smart Phone Space
- There
Goes Those Fancy eBook Aspirations from Apple, Barnes
and Noble, and Amazon: 100,000’s of FREE eBooks from the
Public Library - How
Google is Looking to Cut Apple’s Margin and How the
Sell Side of Wall Street Will Enable This Without
Sheeple Investor’s Having a Clue - Empirical Evidence of Android Eating Apple!
- More of the Android Onslaught: Increasing Handset Revenues and Growth
- Many More Black Eyes for the Blackberry? A Complete Forensic Analysis of Research in Motion
- The BoomBustBlog Multivariate Research in Motion Valuation Model: Ready for Download
- The Complete, 63 pg Google Forensic Valuation is Available for Download
- iSuppli Continues to Validate BoomBustBlog’s Original Thesis: Android as the Viral Game Changer!
- BoomBustBlog Research Hits Another One Out the Park! Google up nearly 10% after hours, true blowout earnings unlike JPM
- As
I Warned in June, DO NOT DISCOUNT Microsoft in This Mobile Computing
War! Their Marketing Campaign is PURE GENIUS! and it Appears as if
the Phone Ain’t Bad Either - Reggie Middleton Wasn’t the ONLY Openly Apple Bear in the Blogoshpere, Was He?
- A Quick Peek Into the REAL WORLD Logic That Went Into Building the BoomBustBlog Apple Model: It’s Called Compression!!!
- advertisements -
I know a lot of proponents in colleges who love its cheap number crunching capabilities, but I haven't been able to trust them either. Yet.
I remember having a similar discussion about mobile os about 7yrs ago. Then it was Nokia and Android in the limelight, with MS a poor 3rd. Nokia fizzled out, but oh my, Android has grown up!
Never liked Macs and never will. I'd rather install Windows 3.11 than run Office on a Mac.
i-tampons. User interface irritation guaranteed.
Speaking of MSFT WP7, have been quite impressed with it on the basic and Cloud level. Once the OS update comes next month they should have a very impressive contender to Android. new apps are coming in fast for WP7 too, though still needs more time to really bulk up the app count.
I am not unhappy with my WP7 phone - htc HD7. I only hope it lasts as long as the unlocked Orange version of the Dash I got off eBay a couple of years back - I wore it out.
One of my concerns was the Exchange (or Kerio Connect) aspect - I support of several of those environments - so far no problems with either. Not a big phone app user, minor camera usage for documentation purposes - mainly email, panic alerts, contacts & calendar. Lack of a secure RDP app is surprising though.
It will be interesting to see how things develop. I sorely miss my time & billing app that has yet to be ported (if) to WP7. But without ActiveSync or an equal, it will need to be jiggered big-time.
Apple... pffffff.... cults are a bad thing.
iDiots
>That makes Apple the “Fragmentation Title Holder”!
Or it can be spun as the "OS Improvement Title Holder", with more and bigger OS improvements than anyone else.
>Android 2.x OS devices now account for an 83% share
And x.y accounts for 100% share. Big deal.
Focusing on such a tiny datum as the quantity of versions seems silly. What do developers think of the platforms? What are the actual development costs? What does actual entrepeneurial experience show regarding the platforms?
Androids updates are at least 2x to 3x as frequent as iOSs, and as for bigger, Android introduced full flash compatibility and a JIT compiler in the same time frame that Apple fixed a few bugs and attempted to prevent jailbreaking by visiting a web page. The rate and quality of growth and improvement are literally incomparable and heavily in Google/Android's favor.
Look at the stats, it's not "tiny datum" - it's the real deal:
http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html
Android is not fragmented. And yes, it may seem silly to even suggest that it's fragmented - but it's Apple who has brought up that bogus argument. Reality is that users are upgrading very quickly, because cross-version compatibility is so good and the upgrade path is so smooth.
When was the last time you could upgrade a Windows box between two major versions within 3 minutes? That's literally what an Android 2.0 -> 2.2 upgrade takes these days. Tap on a single "OK" and the Android OTA upgrade is performed fully automatically and after the upgrades all the apps are there, installed, configured and the user can continue to use it.
IMO it's not just Apple who is toast but Microsoft as well - but that will be a longer process, because Google isn't even competing with Windows head on yet - they picked Apple first.
"it's Apple who has brought up that bogus argument [fragmentation]"
Ah, I made the error of thinking this article was meant as some kind of objective, helpful research. I guess it was meant as a snarky fanboy retort to Apple. Sorry, I don't see a point in further discussing such nonsense.
RIM and Nokia will fall before MSFT. They both have inferior products and less marketing muscle. Revisit the link list at the bottom of the article. MSFT's OS refresh is more than a refresh, its a complete rewrite based on a completely new paradigm. Blackbery OS 6 is last year's OS, if even that - and I can't even be that nice to Nokia's efforts.
Actually just switched from a Nexus one to a NOK N8.
I agree that Symbian needs further work but I must say it is refreshing to be able to leave home without having to pack a car battery with me.
Personally I think the rumors of NOKs demise are greatly exaggerated but I realize that's a minority opinion here in the US where shiny, bouncy things trump all.
You should have consulted me and I would have saved you money and effort. you could download a free power management app that intelligently and dynamically manages programs access to networking and power consumption that can easily double battery life. juice defender is a good example, in combination with. Set CPU to dynamically scale the CPU contingent upon demand.
"Apple 4.x does not run on 83% or more of the Apple mobile devices sold. That makes Apple the “Fragmentation Title Holder”!"
=> Apples, and oranges. The OS versions on all the Apple iPhones emanate from one software company which has built them all from the same code base & architectural framework, under one strategy. So long as Droid variants are released by multiple companies, each with its own distinct interests and strategies, and rely on a code base provided by another company, concerns about Droid fragmentation are more relevant than concerns about iPhone fragmentation.
But all apples and oranges look like beans from an accounting pov ? Sorry, couldn't resist -- Regggie, your analysis usually strikes me as spot-on, but here, I think, no.
You are mistaken, the various Android skins do not matter to compatibility. It's as if you counted iPhones with a non-default background picture as 'separate versions'. It's nonsense - in reality there's just two versions of Android that matter: 2.x and older - with 'older' being 15% and shrinking quickly.
90% of the Android apps run on 90% of the Android handsets, with no modifications needed whatsoever - that is what matters to carriers, advertisers, developers and users. Android, barely 2 years old, is a growth juggernaut because users are loving it. Google has positioned itself very nicely.
In practice Android compatibility is better than Windows compatibility. Think about it.
I find it funny reading business people try to talk intelligently about software development. I dont pretend to be a trader (because I not). I would hope most here would respect the other side as well, but unfortunately not....
Version compatability misses the point entirely. UI issues is where the problem lies. Meaning, multiple resolution formats...
As far as codebase, JDK (as well as Ant) are used ..... Who gives a rats ass what version Android is....
I find it funny when programmers think nobody understands tech besides them. I have presided over several development. Projects of my own, managing outsourced teams from overseas since the early 90s, and more importantly I use this stuff daily.
How many screen resolutions do you have to content with when dealing with devices capable of running 2.x?
If you are an app writer and if you care about the position of every last pixel (i.e. if you are not using the built-in auto-scaling windowing primitives) then with Android there's basically just 3 screen resolutions to support:
http://androidforums.com/android-lounge/207629-review-android-device-sta...
If you are an app writer for iOS then there's three screen resolutions to care about:
So yes, it's all the same - even for screen resolutions iOS is "fragmented" just as much as Android.
It mostly matters for games, which want to do pixel based graphics - the remaining apps use scaled graphics and are largely screen resolution independent.
Thank you!
How much of Droid compatibility is due to app writers having to implement it w/ each app, and how much is inherent to the the Droid code base? this is a real question, not rhetorical.
Having had terrible compatibility experiences w/ Activesync on a Win Mobile PDA, one of the 4.x releases I think, I'd have to agree w/ you re MSFT. Moved from that to an iPhone last week.
boo-yah!
apple is crap. buy sun hardware instead.
http://covert2.wordpress.com
It is rather obvious that the author of this article (as well as the comment above) have absolutely no idea what "fragmented" means. It has nothing to do with version numbers. It has to do with screen resolutions and toolsets.
Fragmented codebases (web development is the worst) means that develops have to put an enourmous about of code just to make sure their app runs on as many devices as possible. This dramatically increases development time (and lowers quality).
iOS is extremely good about this. Essentially you have two screen resolutions to worry about, and Xcode (iOS dev tools) does a great job is making their rather easy manage. Android is a nightmare from this standpoint. Unless I test ever single device, I how no idea how it will look when it runs...
Notwithstanding the compliment you gave me, isn't it true that practically every device that can run 2.x android has a minimum 3.5 inch screen with all screens running the same or one of two resolutions and 1 ghz processor? Wouldn't that make 83% of the handsets quite uniform? Isn't the codebase extremely similar between 2.1 and 2.2? Are. You sure I don't know what I'm talking about?
Careful Reggie, you are attacking the Pope, Allah, Whirlpool, Zenith, and Athena if you say anything anything negative about Apple and Mac (bow, gesticulate, bow, walk backwards).
New studies show that people are so connected to their technological devices that they cannot separate critiques of the devices from critiques of them personally.
does android2.2 require minimum 3.5", min resolution, min processor speed on devices that run it? I had installed froyo 2.2 on my droid which i think was 600mhz overclocked to 800 mhz. But it was rooted. I am not sure google requires some min spec from phone hardware companies to allow install of the android marketplace.
Microsoft is actually requiring minimum configuration requirement for devices running wp7 which i guess is to standardize specs to help app development. I just moved from android to winphone7 and I like the winphone7 ui. Also I think integration with xbox live is a big win for wp7.
I do think the great mobile wars in the next decade will be between android and microsoft. i thikn the ifone will slowly die off.
As an official OTA upgrade, yes. You as a technical person did yourself,
Also, it's kind of ironic how some people refer to WP7 as a new entry into the smartphone market and refer to it as 'game changer'.
It's the seventh Windows Phone release - and it still sucks just like all its Windows Phone predecessors.
No copy&pase, no multi-tasking, in 2010? A security concept from the OS design team that brought us hundreds of thousands of Windows virii is not something I'm looking for when I shop for a new smartphone either :-)
There was a steep technical cost to monopolizing the desktop, and on Windows phones you can see all the results first hand.
Yeah.
Google's very smooth Over-The-Air updates to Android are converting users to newer versions of Android - while keeping full app compatibility and keeping all user data such as contacts, email, settings, etc.
That's better than iOS upgrades: if you have not synced your iPhone to your PC before you upgrade your iPhone you will lose all iPhone user data. With Android the upgrade is seemless and always secure.
Apple's posturing about Android "fragmentation" is essentially a PR gimmick. If this is the 'worst' anti-Android talking point Apple strategists have come up with then I'd agree with Reggie that iOS is toast in the long run.
It's the classic free-market forces (Android/Google/Motorola/Samsung/HTC/etc.) battle against anti-free-market, monopolist forces (Apple and also Microsoft).
Fetch the popcorn, 2011 is going to be interesting!