Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Google Android 2.2: Progress or more platform fragmentation?

analysis
May 21, 20102 mins

Android developers have been whining about how Google's mobile platform is fragmenting. Get real!

Yesterday’s release of Android 2.2 and SDK API 8 will evoke two possible responses from developers:

  • Wow! Twenty new enterprise-oriented features, double the speed for apps, support for Flash and the .Net Framework, better touch reporting, and better voice integration! I can do a lot with that!
  • Oy! Twenty new enterprise-oriented features, double the speed for apps, support for Flash and the .Net Framework, better touch reporting, and better voice integration. What a nightmare to support all this for eight different API levels, with and without Google API support, plus dozens of resolutions and devices with a variety of hardware features, not to mention the two possible UIs and all the national languages! And what about my installed base?

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Of course, both responses are correct. But one is a spur to action, and the other is whining about what’s just a fact of life. If you want to write great software for devices, you have to deal with a large variety of hardware and system software.

Show me a class of mobile device that has been around for more than a year, and I’ll show you a litany of different device form factors, processors, memory configurations, location sensors, and human interface hardware. Even the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad family has this, and that’s all coming from Apple.

It’s not a problem so much as a sign of a healthy market that so many different devices are coming out for Android. Developers have a choice: Whine about it, or jump in and make something great.

This article, “Google Android 2.2: Progress or more platform fragmentation?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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