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Fragmentation is a phenomenon that Google isn't too unfamiliar with. After all, the term has been frequently used to describe Google's Android platform.
When people say Android is fragmented (and these people are usually Android developers), they mean to say that due to the way Google allows device manufacturers to customize the hardware to run Android, that making a simple Android app becomes increasingly difficult if you want it to work on all devices. At the last count, there are four major Android OS versions (1.5, 1.6, 2.1 and 2.2). Then there are three different classes of screen resolutions that developers have to cater for (low, medium and high dpi, or dots per inch), and finally, there are three different screen sizes to consider (small, normal, and large for tablets types). That's 36 different combinations of hardware and software that a developer has to cater for. And that's not even considering things like different levels of performance, and included/missing features like multi-touch, between the phones. Some Android phones still include resistive touch screens!
And the same thing is now being labelled against Google TV, which shares a lot of similarities with the Android platform (Google TV will be able to run Android apps soon , for one). Even though it has only just been launched, and even though there are only two major manufacturers that have come out with a Google TV product (Sony and Logitech), some say fragmentation is already occurring.
Different controllers, different levels of online content support, different look and feel (but that's to be expected, and not really considered fragmentation),
and different levels of hardware support, means that for future Google TV app developers, or Android developers that want to publish on Google TV as well, things just got a lot harder.
Taking a look at Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 and the strict hardware requirements that Microsoft has placed on manufacturers using the OS (such as 1GHz processors, all must feature capacitive/multi-touch screens), and Apple's total domination of all things hardware and software, perhaps Google's open approach may be giving manufacturers too much freedom to mess things up.
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When people say Android is fragmented (and these people are usually Android developers), they mean to say that due to the way Google allows device manufacturers to customize the hardware to run Android, that making a simple Android app becomes increasingly difficult if you want it to work on all devices. At the last count, there are four major Android OS versions (1.5, 1.6, 2.1 and 2.2). Then there are three different classes of screen resolutions that developers have to cater for (low, medium and high dpi, or dots per inch), and finally, there are three different screen sizes to consider (small, normal, and large for tablets types). That's 36 different combinations of hardware and software that a developer has to cater for. And that's not even considering things like different levels of performance, and included/missing features like multi-touch, between the phones. Some Android phones still include resistive touch screens!
And the same thing is now being labelled against Google TV, which shares a lot of similarities with the Android platform (Google TV will be able to run Android apps soon , for one). Even though it has only just been launched, and even though there are only two major manufacturers that have come out with a Google TV product (Sony and Logitech), some say fragmentation is already occurring.
Different controllers, different levels of online content support, different look and feel (but that's to be expected, and not really considered fragmentation),
and different levels of hardware support, means that for future Google TV app developers, or Android developers that want to publish on Google TV as well, things just got a lot harder.
Taking a look at Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 and the strict hardware requirements that Microsoft has placed on manufacturers using the OS (such as 1GHz processors, all must feature capacitive/multi-touch screens), and Apple's total domination of all things hardware and software, perhaps Google's open approach may be giving manufacturers too much freedom to mess things up.
More:
