Android has been making rapid strides into
the Mobile market and has become a serious contender for the top 1 position in
the mobile market (and is picking up on the tablet market quite quickly).
The fact that it was anopen platform
allowing for lot of innovation and choice made the developer world and the
mobile OEMs vouch for it and the inroads it madeinto the market was significant
– significant enough for Apple to stand up, take note and even file a law suit J
However, this very fact is now slowly
turning to be a bane for the Android platform, as it has led to a huge amount
of fragmentation in the market. OpenSignalMaps
has done a research in 195 countries and has come up with the graphic that
clearly depicts the kind of fragmentation in Android devices.
Samsung has clearly take a lion share of
the market followed by HTC, Sony Ericcson and Motorola. An interesting fact is
that they have spotted 3997 distinct devices!
This very fact has brought down the
euphoria around Android. Another
study by Appcelerator and
International Data Corporation (IDC) says:
“The most
significant finding in the Q2 2012 Developer Survey is Apple opening a dramatic
16% lead over Google’s Android as far as which OS will win in the enterprise
marketplace, with 53.2% of developers saying iOS will win vs. 37.5% saying
Android will win. This is a very significant change over only three quarters: in
Q3 2011, developers viewed iOS and Android in a dead heat at 44% each.”
The challenges of this fragmentation are around
the varied screen sizes and the many OS versions which translate to the larger
effort and investment into testing on the varied combinations to keep all
customers happy.
A graphic that illustrates the varied
resolutions:
and the number of device models:
The above statistics sound a bit unsettling around
the fragmentation aspects of Android and would probably scare away developers from investing on this platform!
But in my opinion, this is no different from the
fragmentation on PC (probably better than that) where the browsers, the CPU
powers, the models etc. are varied and still we have lot of gaming apps that
are developed for all of them.
Probably the good news is that Android right
from the beginning is learning its lessons quickly and it introduced the
concept of “fragments” to scale to varied screen sizes and designs.
Android is just going through the stabilization
phase of a open platform and the good news from the same study by Appelerator
and IDC says:
“Android has
arrested its decline in developer interest. After a noticeable erosion of
developer interest over the last year, developers’ Android handset “very
interested” levels stabilized in Q2 2012 compared to Q1 2012, and Android
tablet “very interested” levels ticked up 2.9%.”
So, in my opinion, Android with all its
challenges is just grown over the hype cycle and is here to stay as a strong
contender to other mobile OSes and would probably win the race. However, right from the beginning, developers have to keep these variations in mind and build apps that look as seamless as possible on multiple OSes.
And testers, if you are reading, here is your chance... A lot of opportunities around device coverage, OS version coverage, screen size coverage and so on.
