<story><title>The Android Screen Fragmentation Myth</title><url>http://rustyshelf.org/2014/07/08/the-android-screen-fragmentation-myth</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>joeblau</author><text>As a developer, layout and screen size is not the main problem with Android.  To be honest, Android isn&amp;#x27;t even the problem.  It&amp;#x27;s hardware that Android is built on that is the problem.  If a handset is broken down into all of it&amp;#x27;s sensors [Speaker, Camera, Light Sensor, Microphone, Compass, Accelerometer, Clock, NFC, GPS, Screen, BLE, Wifi, Altimeter, Speedometer, CPU] that&amp;#x27;s where the fragmentation problem is.  It&amp;#x27;s hard to say which devices contain certain sensors (CPU, Screen, Camera, Mic, and Speakers are pretty standard).  Of the devices that have most of those sensors, it&amp;#x27;s hard to say say which devices have those sensors working correctly.&lt;p&gt;I attended a Facebook&amp;#x2F;Parse hackathon where FB detailed issues about a certain bug in specific CPU&amp;#x27;s with respect to a C++ based photo processing library.  Certain Android phones would randomly crash.  There is also the infamous compass video [1] where multiple devices all with different hardware report different readings.  As a developer, the Android Emulator makes me think I&amp;#x27;m going to have a consistent user experience, but based on hardware, I may not.&lt;p&gt;In my personal experience, I built this game (&lt;a href=&quot;http://joeblau.com/orb./&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;joeblau.com&amp;#x2F;orb.&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) which runs on iOS and Android and I noticed a crazy bug where it would only crash on S4&amp;#x27;s from Sprint, not from Verizon or AT&amp;amp;T.  I re-worked some code to get the application working eventually, but the fact that something would only break on a specific carrier&amp;#x27;s version of the hardware was crazy to me. The problem is not Android; Android as an OS is actually very good. The problem is HTC, Samsung, Motorola and all of the other hardware manufacturers that build the handsets.  Thankfully Google is doing what it can to address the hardware issue by announcing their Android One program, but that hurts other hardware competitors.&lt;p&gt;[1] - &lt;a href=&quot;https://vine.co/v/MgWLMmmwUQQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;vine.co&amp;#x2F;v&amp;#x2F;MgWLMmmwUQQ&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The Android Screen Fragmentation Myth</title><url>http://rustyshelf.org/2014/07/08/the-android-screen-fragmentation-myth</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>smackfu</author><text>At the same time, Apple is strongly pushing developers to not use pixel perfect layouts anymore that are dependent on particular screen sizes, and to use auto layout everywhere.  If you follow Apple&amp;#x27;s iOS 8 guidance, you really shouldn&amp;#x27;t have any problem dealing with even the original graph of &amp;quot;terrible&amp;quot; fragmentation.&lt;p&gt;Which prompts the question whether it was really that bad after all, or just a gut reaction to something that was different.</text></comment>