Michael DeGusta has painted a painful picture of the ongoing Android vs. iOS war. Mr. DeGusta looked back at all US-available Android devices as of mid-2010 and compared their update cycles to that  of Apple’s iPhone. Frankly, when it comes to OS fragmentation, it doesn’t look good for Android.

Though the picture certainly would [...]]]>

Michael DeGusta has painted a painful picture of the ongoing Android vs. iOS war. Mr. DeGusta looked back at all US-available Android devices as of mid-2010 and compared their update cycles to that  of Apple’s iPhone. Frankly, when it comes to OS fragmentation, it doesn’t look good for Android.

Though the picture certainly would look different if Mr. DeGusta were to look at phones released after June 2010, it highlights an issue many have with the Android platform. People routinely comment on posts here at Android and Me expressing their frustration with not limited functionality or inability to download certain applications because they’re not on the latest version of Android.

Of course, comparing Android to Apple in this regard is like comparing apples and oranges. It’s easy to update the iPhone, since Apple owns both the hardware and software market for their device. Since Android devices are made by multiple manufacturers who all insist on customizing their devices as a means of differentiating their products, it adds a layer of complexity to updating the core Android software. Perhaps this will become less of an issue if we ever hear anything out of the Android Update Alliance.

What do you guys think? Is fragmentation still a big issue? Are you hopeful that the update alliance will come through in the end? Sound off in the comments.

The next version of Android, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, is the company’s “most ambitious release to date,” according to Google’s Mike Cleron. We know that the Android team is “targeting a Q4 launch”, but there is little else we have learned about this major update to Google’s mobile OS. Here at Android and [...]]]>

The next version of Android, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, is the company’s “most ambitious release to date,” according to Google’s Mike Cleron. We know that the Android team is “targeting a Q4 launch”, but there is little else we have learned about this major update to Google’s mobile OS. Here at Android and Me we love to speculate, so the team rounded up all the Ice Cream Sandwich rumors and decided to investigate them. Read on to see what exciting features might accompany the next version of Android.

1. One operating system to rule them all

“If I had to pick one word to describe Android’s phenomenal growth over the past year, the word would be choice,” said Mike Cleron at Google I/O in May. He went on to describe all the devices of every size and shape that were powered by Android including smartphones, tablets, TVs, and more.  ”Our top priority for Ice Cream Sandwich will be to give app developers the tools they need to deliver great experiences on all of these devices.”

The biggest problem that Android developers currently face is fragmentation. Smartphones, tablets, and TVs each run their own version of Android. Google has tried to educate developers on how to work with different screen sizes, but even they acknowledged the problem when they recently started allowing developers to upload multiple versions of their applications to target different devices.

How did Android find itself in this situation? “We took a shortcut,” said Andy Rubin in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek.

Last year Google was faced with a difficult problem. They wanted to release the tablet version of Android as soon as possible to compete with Apple’s iPad, so they split their development team into two groups. One team worked on the Gingerbread update for smartphones and another went to work on Honeycomb for tablets.

“To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs,” said Andy Rubin. ”We didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable.”

So Google went on to debut their latest phone OS (Gingerbread) on the Nexus S in December and they released their tablet OS (Honeycomb) on the Motorola Xoom in February. Since that time, the entire Android team has been hard at work trying to combine these two.

2. State of the art UI

The Holographic UI that debuted with Honeycomb.

We don’t know exactly what Ice Cream Sandwich will look like, but we know it will be an upgrade of the Holographic UI that we first saw on Honeycomb tablets. It was announced during Google I/O that “all of the good stuff” which debuted in Honeycomb would find its way to smartphones. This includes the Holographic UI, new launcher, new multitasking UI, richer widgets, and advanced applications.

Some have speculated that new Android smartphones might lose their capacitive buttons in favor of on-screen navigation buttons like Honeycomb tablets, but this has yet to be confirmed. Ice Cream Sandwich will come to some existing phones, so support for real buttons will have to be maintained.

3. Finally open sourced

If you are a fan of custom ROMs, then you will be happy to know that Google plans to release Ice Cream Sandwich to the Android Open Source Project. Google typically releases the source code to each version of Android a few months after it debuts on a new device, but they chose not to do this with Honeycomb. Andy Rubin said Google wanted to prevent developers from putting the software on phones “and creating a really bad user experience. We have no idea if it will even work on phones.”

Ice Cream Sandwich will be available for the development community to hack to their hearts’ content and I’m sure we will see CyanogenMod 8 a month after the source code is public.

4. Hello Android 4.0

Google doesn’t assign a version number to their Android releases until the last moment, but you can bet that Ice Cream Sandwich will eventually become Android 4.0. This is the “most ambitious release to date” so there is no way Google is going to call it Android 3.x. We also know that Apple will debut iOS 5 this fall, so Google will counter with the “4.0″ branding to tell everyone this is a significant upgrade over Android 3.x.

5. Linux 3.0 kernel

I’m not a Linux geek so I won’t even try to go into the details, but Ice Cream Sandwich will use the latest 3.0 kernel. Linus Torvalds announced the latest update on July 21st to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his announcement of Linux and that’s about all I know.

6. Music purchases in Android Market

The latest Android Market already has icons for their music store.

We have long been expecting Google to sell music in their Android Market, but it still hasn’t happened yet. It was recently discovered that the latest update to the Android Market included icons for their music store, so it already has the support when Google decides to flip the switch. This could occur before Ice Cream Sandwich is released, but I’m predicting that Google decides to roll this out as another selling point of Android 4.0.

7. More optimizations for multi-core processors in smartphones

Android 3.0 was the first version of the platform designed to run on either single or multi-core processor architectures. Android 2.x supports multi-core  processors, but it was not designed from the ground up to be fully optimized.

Honeycomb included a variety of changes in the Dalvik VM, Bionic library, and elsewhere that can benefit all applications, even those that are single-threaded. For example, with two active cores, a single-threaded application might still see a performance boost if the Dalvik garbage collector runs on the second core.

Rumors and evidence suggest that Google went with the dual-core OMAP4 (see video above) as the lead platform for Ice Cream Sandwich, so we can expect a significant boost in smartphone performance.

8. Up to 1.8x faster than Honeycomb?

Speaking of performance increases, one of our sources told us Ice Cream Sandwich is up to 1.8x faster than Honeycomb. They didn’t provide any other details, so we don’t know if this refers to browser, GPU, or overall system performance. For all we know, they could have been talking about performance gains from the latest hardware.

Whatever happens, it is pretty safe to assume that Ice Cream Sandwich will be the fastest version of Android we have ever seen.

9. Google TV and Chrome OS integration with smart docks

With the different Android code bases coming together, look for Google to take a page out of Motorola’s playbook and emulate their smart dock strategy. What I’m referring to is a dynamic user experience that changes on the fly depending on which device or smart dock that your phone is connected to. If you connect your phone to a TV, you might see Google TV-like features or a full-blown Chrome OS-type browser. We predicted this back in January and I believe it will happen sooner rather than later.

10. An official theme engine for OEMs

File this one under rumors, but we have also been told that Google is working on an official themeing engine with select OEMs (Sony was tossed around). Most of the popular alternative launchers that you can download in the Android Market (like my fav Go Launcher EX) already include support for themes, but Google has never offered this as a default feature.

This could be a result of the Android update alliance that was formed to smooth over the release process. A true theme engine could allow Google to update the core Android system and the OEM’s UI overlay would remain intact.

11. A true competitor to Apple’s Game Center

Apple announced their Game Center service back in 2010.

Android already has several social gaming networks like OpenFeint and Scoreloop, but it looks like Google is finally ready to dive in with their own official competitor to Apple’s Game Center.

Rumors of a Google Games service go back several years and it looks like Google+ will play an important role in the service. Code discovered in Google+ hints at Google Games and one of our sources said we should expect to see it with Ice Cream Sandwich.

12. Support for existing phones

At Google I/O I asked the Android team if Ice Cream Sandwich had any special hardware requirements that would prevent it from running on existing smartphones. They didn’t name specific handsets, but we were told that most phones which could run Android 2.3 would be able to handle the update. That doesn’t guarantee anything for current Android smartphone owners, but we expect Google’s own Nexus One and Nexus S will be some of the first devices upgraded to Android 4.0.

13. New camera tricks, virtual camera operator

Finally, we can say for certain that Ice Cream Sandwich will feature a ton of new developer APIs, including several cool camera tricks. Several of these were actually demoed at Google I/O and you can see them in the clip above (or watch the entire day 1 keynote if you wish).

Conclusion

As we get closer to the release of Android 4.0, more details will continue to leak out. Some people think this might happen as soon as October, but my gut tells me that might be pushed back to late November or December. We would love to see Ice Cream Sandwich (and the Nexus 3) released on the dot, but Google’s track record shows us that they are more often late than early. I would personally prefer that they take their time and get it right, instead of pushing out another half-baked release like Honeycomb.

What potential features of Android 4.0 are you looking forward to the most?

At the Open Mobile Summit in London today, Elop talked about a wide range of [...]]]> What do you do when your company is falling apart and no one is buying your product? You diss the competition, of course. Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, has once again let us know how much he doesn’t like Android.

At the Open Mobile Summit in London today, Elop talked about a wide range of topics, like:  how Nokia is doing better than ever (if by better he means dying, then yes, much better), how Android exists only thanks to the iPhone, how he plans to become a carrier’s best friend and how Windows Phone is not doing well because OEMs prefer Android instead.

However, there was one part of his speech that really caught our attention. Elop claimed that Android devices all look and act the same and that “if it’s too hard to differentiate on a platform, commoditization steps in. But then differentiation starts to creep back in through fragmentation.” In other words, if OEMs want to differentiate themselves, they’ll have to fragment Android.

Mr. Elop seems to have forgotten that Nokia will soon be making Windows Phone devices, which allow for even less differentiation than Android. As some of you might know, Microsoft has some very strict rules on what OEMs can change about Windows Phone devices on both the software and hardware side. Android, on the other hand, doesn’t have such limitations. Instead, Google encourages people to put Android on as much devices as they can.

Because of this openness, we have Android phones that range from very affordable to very expensive, from earth-loving to Apocalypse-ready, and from girly to business-friendly. At the same time, all these Android phones are compatible with each other.

Seeing how worried Elop is about differentiation, it’ll be interesting to see how Nokia manages to stand out from the extremely homologous Windows Phone crowd. Will Microsoft give preference to Nokia and allow it to change Windows Phone? If so, how will HTC and Samsung react? We’ll have to wait and see.

Our readers (and some staffers) have lamented that this type of fragmentation is the worst [...]]]> One of the biggest gripes we’ve heard with the recent onslaught of Tegra 2-only games is the fact that they’re Tegra-only. If you don’t own one of the shiny new dual-core Tegra devices, you simply can’t play these new games.

Our readers (and some staffers) have lamented that this type of fragmentation is the worst kind to plague the Android platform. Rather than having applications restricted to version types (a problem Google is attempting to remedy with the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich version update), the new wave of fragmentation will render an application unusable unless your phone has the correct chipset.

It seems the folks over at XDA feel the same way, as they’re already hard at work on a fix for the modding community. XDA member Chainfire has built Chainfire3D, an intermediary OpenGL driver that “sits between your applications and graphics drivers, and can intercept and/or change commands between the two.”

Perusing the comments on the Chainfire3D thread shows that they have some Tegra-only games working on the Samsung Galaxy S2, and it’s only a matter of time before they find a way to offer full support for non-Tegra devices. You can head over to XDA to read all about this work in these three threads:

1. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1087427
2. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1068567
3. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1090032

The very fact that people are working hard on this issue only does more to bring the issue to the forefront. With the proliferation of Tegra-only games and the device-selective release of the long-awaited Netflix application, it seems this chipset-based app fragmentation isn’t going away anytime soon, and highlights the growing sense of competition coming to the Android platform. With Amazon trying to score exclusive applications away from Google’s Android Market, and chipset manufacturers trying to do the same thing to differentiate their chips to both customers and cell manufacturers, the Android platform is increasingly becoming a battleground, and I fear that customers are the ones who are going to lose out in the end.

As is customary with our posts, we want to know what you think.

1. Is this chipset-based fragmentation bad for Android, or is it necessary to deliver the top quality of games?
2. Does the featured applications on a certain type of chipset influence your device purchases?
3. Are you going to brave the XDA forums and try out Chainfire3d?

Answer these (and more) questions in the comments below.

Some people would point to the fact that [...]]]> Google hates the word fragmentation when it’s used to refer to the Android ecosystem. They call it the “F-word”. I’ve seen it used many ways, but generally when developers talk about Android being fragmented they are referring to the hundreds of devices that they have to support.

Some people would point to the fact that over 80% of devices run Android 2.x, so what’s the problem? All you need to do is code your app to work with the different platform versions and display sizes and it should work, right?

Recent updates to the Android Market even allow developers to filter out devices based on screen sizes and densities (and soon GL texture compression formats). If a developer knows that a group of devices will not support their app, they should just be able to block those users from ever downloading it.

What sounds like a simple task to some is actually a huge problem for the big Android game developers. Just ask EA Mobile and Gameloft.

Developers might be able to filter out devices based on certain specifications, but they are still unable to target individual handsets.

For example, just look at some of the comments on any of EA Mobile’s new games that just went on sale. You will find hundreds of complaints from upset customers who purchased a game only to find out it didn’t work on their phone. You would think that a large developer like EA Mobile could have prevented these problems before they occurred, but they are still struggling with it.

To make matters worse, many of these people were unable to get their money back because of the new 15 minute refund window. Google raised the max size of apps to 50 MB, but most 3D games easily go over that limit so developers have to create their own distribution methods to deliver the extra data files. This process takes place after the point of purchase and that’s a problem when it takes over 15 minutes to download the files needed to see if the game even works.

Gameloft is another big game developer that has struggled to support the massive number of Android devices. When they first tested the waters of the Android Market , they offered over 20 games. After experiencing all kinds of problems and user complaints, they have reduced that to a single title – Asphalt HD.

If game developers are removing their games from the Android Market and creating their own distribution channels (like Gameloft’s online store), then there is clearly a problem. These developers are essentially saying that it’s not worth the added support costs (and hit to their reputation) to offer their games in Google’s Market. I’ve been very tough on Gameloft in the past, but I’m starting to see things from their point of view.

So what’s the solution?

Android Market comments for EA Mobile.

Sprint explains the ID platform to their customers as follows: “Make your phone a reflection of [...]]]> What is Sprint ID? It is Sprint’s custom version of Android that is coming to “most all of” their products next year, but I’m still having a hard time figuring out exactly what Sprint is doing with it long-term.