[...] pour les développeurs Android que les développeurs de iPhone n’ont pas, c’est la compatibilité avec plusieurs modèles de téléphone, et plusieurs versions d’Android. Dans le cas du Tattoo, tout d’abord, mon application [...]

[...] The last phase includes testing and making sure that the application works well for as many devices as possible! (You may click here to see a complete list of phones that run on [...]

Great article Robert!

I think Todd is right. Fragmentation is nothing new. The Java ME world for instance has had this problem for a decade soon. In the first 2-3 years the fragmentation was rather limited, due to that most games was targeting Nokia S40 and later S60 devices. From 2003 the market really started to get fragmented. We have been developing mobile games for 8 years on most platforms and Android is currently not even close to being as fragmented as the world of Java ME.

I also do think your multiplayer argument is almost as vague as claming PC game development is not fragmented. There are for example tons of other issues related to multiplayer development which cause “fragementation” problems (but similiar to your problem exist solutions too) that could as well be used to argue for PC as a fragmented platform.

This is not to say that PC is just as fragmented as Android. PC probably has the benefictial of being an easier platform to test on in most cases and a few other things. But there is no doubt that fragmention is not something new that has appeared with Android.

No dobut, Android is fragmented, but far far from what it will end up being. This is just the begining.

[...]  I’m not the first to realize this is an issue (official Android documentation and another post).  The iPhone, on the other hand, has one screen resolution 320 x 480, and one input mechanism, [...]

How has WinMo coped with this issue… They keep throwing out new phones with different resolutions as well. Let;’s see, the Dash, Treo, HTC Touch, Touch Pro 2, Imagio, HD. Not to mention the countless HP/Dell PDAs out there. It’s definitely not new and they should’ve taken it into account before hand but… eh… what can they do now… Move forward like WinMo (still an ok platform)… It’d be nice if they had unique developers specific to the device or carrier.

A response to this post: http://yglodt.blogspot.com/2009/11/so-called-android-fragementation.html

[...] Android fragmentation is real and it is not going away. Ask any developer and they will tell you about the difficulties of supporting multiple versions of Android and their different screen sizes. [...]

This is one of many problems the Android platform has over the iPhone. People always seem to think that openness and freedom is better for everyone, but this is a clear example that it isn’t. Of course businesses will be drawn to develop for the iPhone when you can reach much larger audience with less effort.

I’m part of a mobile development startup (MobisleApps) focusing mainly on the Android platform and we do believe firmly in the potential of the Android platform. But Google is making it very hard for us to prosper because they don’t seem to have a consistent strategy that we can hang on to. This whole device inconsistency is a real pain when it comes to development of nice user interfaces. If Google at least could restrict the OS to run on only 2 screen resolutions then it could be controllable. But now we have to see which device will become the most popular and see to it that our apps are catered to it. Adapting to all possible screen sizes is uncontrollable overhead and the restrictions would water down the interface to a mess. So it’s absolutely not only game developers that are restricted by this.

So Google, if you wan’t a flourishing developer community on the Android, please shed som light on this and your strategies for the future of Android.

[...] Complications looming for Android developers. [...]

One way to solve some of the issues is do what NexSoftware is doing and stop supporting Android 1.5 all together and try and force the manufacturers and providers to do upgrades.