![]() In fact, it’s not hard to see the iPhone 5c as an attempt by Apple to reach potential customers who may previously have been put off by the prices of the 5 and 5s, and to compete with higher-end Android smartphones. ![]() It just has more reach, which is almost entirely down to the options available to consumers. There’s an Android device out there that will fit almost any budget and fulfill any number of feature or hardware requirements.Ĭompare this with Apple’s iOS ecosystem, which has a relatively limited selection of devices and commands generally premium prices outside of the United States, and it’s not hard to see why Android has over 80% of the mobile device market. One of the biggest positives to fragmentation is simply the fact that it gives consumers more choice. In the rush to pass judgement on the fragmented Android ecosystem, it’s all too easy to forget that fragmentation, like a lot of things, can be both good and bad. The rate of adoption also differs greatly: it took only one day for iOS 7 to be adopted by 35% of the iOS userbase, whereas Android KitKat took five weeks to reach a 1.1% market share. Thus, users are able to download updates immediately after they go live, without having to wait for manufacturers (or even carriers) to adapt the newest update to fit their specific devices. This really boils down to the fact that the Apple ecosystem is more tightly controlled hardware-wise. ![]() A quick look at Apple’s Apple Developer site shows that more than 78% of users are on iOS 7 as of 29 December 2013, as measured by the App Store.Īs you can see, the pie charts for the two operating systems couldn’t be more different. To really put the severity of Android’s OS fragmentation into context, let’s take a look at iOS. It doesn’t help that device manufacturers are in the business of selling you phones, and thus will use new Android versions to get you to upgrade to a newer device. As you can imagine, this often takes quite a while.ĭevice manufacturers can make their own modifications to Android, for example, the custom user interface layers you get in smartphones from HTC (HTC Sense) and Samsung (Samsung TouchWiz). This means that updates are really out of Google’s hands: once Google releases a new version, the manufacturers have to take it, make any necessary modifications, and then roll the update out to their devices. The fact that Android is open source is, again, the main reason for the OS fragmentation. Some lower-end or older Android devices might not even be running a 4.x version – Android 2.3.x (Gingerbread) still has a 24.1% market share – and probably won’t be getting updates any time soon. Nexus devices received the Android 4.4 KitKat update soon after it was launched, but phones such as the Sony Xperia Z1 are still running older versions (usually 4.2.2 or 4.3). As you can see, there’s quite a large number of devices out there. The image below, taken from OpenSignal’s July 2013 report on Android fragmentation, shows just how many different Android devices downloaded their app in the first half of 2013. So, you have anything from low-end smartphones with sub 4-inch screens to top-of the line quad-core smartphones with 5 inch screens and everything in between, running on Android. Fragmented Market Shareīeing open source, Android can run on pretty much any level of hardware specification or screen size – thus, unlike for iOS devices, there’s no standard for manufacurers to stick to when it comes to running Android. In this post, we’re going to look into the implications of this problem, the repercussions it has on the mobile OS market and what Google is doing about it. Fragmentation actually encompasses two different, but related issues: hardware fragmentation and software (or OS) fragmentation. ![]() When applied to Android, it basically means that there isn’t a standard Android version or device on the market. In general terms, fragmentation is when something is broken down into separate parts, and doesn’t function as a whole. In fact, we have six versions of Android running on more than 11,000 types of devices. Critics often point to fragmentation as being the key factor in why Apple’s iOS is the better mobile operating system, despite the fact that 81 percent of the world’s smartphones run on one version of Android or another. This post was first published on: Jan 16, 2014.Īndroid fragmentation is often brought up as the Achilles’ heel of the OS.
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