Fragmentation Comes To iOS 244
dell623 writes "While the fragmentation issues in iOS are nowhere near as bad as Android, it can no longer be considered non existent. I have prepared a chart showing which features will be available on which device. While some restrictions are the result of hardware limitations, it is clear that Apple has deliberately chosen to limit some previous generation devices, and figuring this out isn't always straightforward if you're not buying the latest iPad or iPhone."
It's pretty clear.... (Score:5, Insightful)
... that the submitter doesn't really understand what the word "fragmentation" means in this context.
Re:It's pretty clear.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is slashdot just linking to people's random ass blogs now? This has got to be the most pointless and uninformed article I've ever seen here. Or it's a troll.
Re:It's pretty clear.... (Score:5, Informative)
I have an ad-blocker, but I assume the page has ads on it and the submitter is just looking for some hits. Nobody should RTFA, just read this post.
He has four products on there that are not currently being sold. One is entirely made up, with made up specs, in a product category that doesn't exist.
Of the remaining six, there's not much fragmentation at all. There are four screen resolutions, which is the only thing developers (for which the term fragmentation typically applies) need to worry about. This includes the 3.5" iPhone/iPod retina display resolution, the new 4" iPhone/iPod retina display resolution, the iPad retina display resolution, and the older non-retina iPad display resolution, which is automatically converted. The submitter made several factual errors with the resolutions, but that's the gist of it. Clearly going forward, there will be just two resolutions that developers need to worry about. One for the iPhone/iPod, and one for the iPad, as the older resolutions are being phased out and don't exist in any new products. This means the platform is no more fragmented than it was when the iPad was first introduced.
There are no dramatic API differences between the various iOS platforms, just the usual and obvious differences in available hardware. iPods and iPads don't have cell network assisted GPS if they don't have chips in them to access cell networks. iPods and iPads don't have Facetime over cell networks when they don't have chips in them to access cell networks. Advanced features of the camera system or microphones are not possible on devices lacking the necessary computing power to handle them.
All in all, nothing in this random submitter's blog post addresses true fragmentation, the sort you see in the Android platform due to API differences and hundreds of different screen resolutions.
There are five screens ... same layout for some (Score:4, Insightful)
There are four screen resolutions, which is the only thing developers (for which the term fragmentation typically applies) need to worry about. This includes the 3.5" iPhone/iPod retina display resolution, the new 4" iPhone/iPod retina display resolution, the iPad retina display resolution, and the older non-retina iPad display resolution, which is automatically converted.
There are five screens. There are the non-retina 3.5" iPhone/iPod touch devices. The 3GS was only obsoleted yesterday, developers are still going to support such devices. They are fully supported by Apple given that they will run iOS 6.
Also saying there are X screens that need to be supported is a little misleading. There are two parts to supporting a particular screen. One is the layout of user interface elements, the other is possibly skinning those elements (applying some sort of bitmap). When going between a non-retina and retina display the layout is the same. Layout is defined in terms of points not pixels, and since points = 1.0 pixels on non-retina and 2.0 pixels on retina there are no scaling artifacts to worry about.
So there are at most 3 layouts to worry about. 3.5", 4" and 9.7" (iPad).
For 3.5" and 9.7" non-retina and retina may be an issue for skinning those user interface elements. Given 1:2 scaling iOS can scale non-retina art quite effectively. Some apps might not need to supply retina versions of art. For those that do, or prefer to, iOS handles it automatically. The developer needs to make **no code changes**. Merely add a retina version of a given art file to the project. For example if my code/resources refer to image.png I add image@2x.png to the project. When the time comes to load image.png iOS automatically checks to see if it is running on a retina device, if so it checks to see if an @2x version of the file in question exists and makes the substitution if it does.
So there are at most four sets of artwork, iPhone/iPad and non-retina/retina, and the non-retina/retina case is handled by iOS not by an app's code or resources. Assuming of course that the app uses artwork in its user interface.
Note my use of "at most". If a developer targets only the 3.5" iPhone screen the app still works very well on an iPad or a 4" iPhone display. Both center the 3.5" layout, there is no stretching, everything looks exactly like the developer intended. On the iPad there is a 2x zoom button if the user wishes, again since it is an exact 2.0 scaling artifacts are minimal if any.
So while it is possible to only target one display, it is more plausible to only target two displays. Non-retina iPhone and non-retina iPad. If a developer is not doing any skinning and the user interface consists of entirely built-in UI widgets then we go from plausible to very practical since iOS handles the scaling for you. All one would miss out on are the extra pixels (in only one dimension) of the 4" display, the app would look exactly the same with absolutely no artifacts.
Re:There are five screens ... same layout for some (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't technically correct:
Layout is defined in terms of points not pixels, and since points = 1.0 pixels on non-retina and 2.0 pixels on retina there are no scaling artifacts to worry about.
Yes, the defined measurement system is points (1/72 inch) and yes, the retina displays are exactly 2.0x the width and height, but when displaying legacy apps on a retina device iOS will place black bars along the edges of the screen to make room for the "1x"/"2x" buttons. So it's closer to 1.8x scaling.
No. The 1x/2x buttons are for running an iPhone app on an iPad, not running a non-retina app on a retina. At 2x a non-retina iPhone app takes 960x640 of the iPad's 1024x768 pixels. There is room for a 1x/2x in the blank regions outside the centered 960x640 app.
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Score: -1 Wrong
The above post is dead on technically accurate, all layout on iOS is done in points, both the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 are 320x480 points. On the 3GS, 1 point will map to 1 pixel, on the 4, 1 point will map to 2 pixels. Most devs can simply provide higher resolution art work (with the same name, but @2x added to the end), and their app will magically support retina.
So the bottom line – you need to support exactly 3 resolutions:
320x480 points
320x568 points
1024x768 points
The first and se
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Clearly going forward, there will be just two resolutions that developers need to worry about. One for the iPhone/iPod, and one for the iPad, as the older resolutions are being phased out and don't exist in any new products.
The old iPhones/iPods/iPads don't cease to exist just because Apple brings out a new one. There is an absolutely enormous installed base of "old" resolutions out there that might still buy your apps, so you can't just start ignoring them. If you want to develop an iOS app you now need to consider whether you accept your app being run in "black bars" mode on the new phone (almost certainly not), or handle the fact that resolution changes depending on which device your app is installed on. I haven't looked a
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Of course. In android world, the so called fragmentation is actually "choice", while in Apple world, it's truly fragmentation.
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They marked you as troll but I have to agree here. Every device listed can run the most recent iOS version with the exception of the original iPad which has only 256MB DDR Ram. Simply showing some hardware that doesn't support a feature isn't quite the same as the API fragmentation in Android where developers are limited by OS adoption (artificially so in most cases as there is no cost incentive from the handset vendors to update existing hardware to the latest OS).
All of the limitations listed there are ha
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Replying to my own post...
The original iPad is excluded from the navigation piece due to it's lack of GPS, and from all of the FaceTime pieces due to lack of a front facing camera, from iPhoto and Panorama due to lack of memory, and from airplay due to lack of hardware H.264 encoding. It does have primitive GPS quasi-capabilities but only in the weakest sense. It has to rely on a more primitive cell tower triangulation rather than containing a true GPS chip.
It was pretty hardware poor as far as features.
Re:It's pretty clear.... (Score:4, Interesting)
iOS fragmentation is far worse than Android fragmentation, because the Apple App Store has no problem selling you software that you can't use on your devices. Google Play won't let you buy an app that won't work on your device, which mitigates a lot of the problems that exist because of fragmentation.
It's annoying because decent software will get rated down on the App Store because it doesn't work on the iPad 1 and angry suckers leave low ratings to show their anger at Apple's incompetence.
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Please enlighten us with this 'fragmentation'. Kindly list some apps that don't run on currently selling hardware.
iPhone 4, 4S, 5
iPad 2, New iPad
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The big difference is that you can only buy apps directly on your Android device so Google Play knows what you have. The iTunes store on my devices also exclude items that won't work with the device I'm buying with.
But if you're using iTunes on the desktop, how is it supposed to know which device of yours you're getting the app for? You could have 15 devices registered, some which would work, others that wouldn't. Every app on the store though lists the required hardware and OS version.
Not true. You can go to the Android store on a browser from any computer while signed in to your account and purchase / install any application directly from the pc. Google will push the application out to the selected device without any user intervention. It knows what devices you have and what features it supports and will filter the applications accordingly.
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No. That's flat out not true. When you log in to purchase the application, you'll get a big fat "no can do, boss" when you attempt to purchase and you don't have a device on your account that can use it.
Re:It's pretty clear.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The bigger point he's missing is that he doesn't even understand what fragmentation means. Fragmentation is multiple parallel products that have incompatibilities. It's NOT current devices currently being on sale being different from older models in the same series let along devices that are no longer on sale. You can argue that there's iOS device fragmentation as far as iPhone vs iPod Touch vs iPad. But the iPhone 3GS and the iPad 1 aren't even on sale any more.
Android is horribly fragmented because there is a huge number of current products with many hardware incompatibilities AND many don't even ship with a recent version of the OS. However much Android fanboys wish iOS devices had the same problem, they just don't.
It's not the same issue. (Score:5, Informative)
Fragmentation is a developer problem that affects how easy it is to roll out software for the platform.
Apple keeps the core APIs consistent across devices. Everything you have listed is unrelated to the developer's ability to build their own apps.
Those are end-user features.
Re:It's not the same issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
The chart in TFA is entirely useless, since it focuses on end user features that apple has or hasn't included on various models; but there is the not-so-minor matter of spec changes(TFA's chart doesn't even touch them; but 'keeping the core APIs consistent' also doesn't address them). There are some pretty significant differences in CPU and GPU power, and how quickly the OS will run out of RAM and quietly start memory-managing you, between those models.
If your 'app' is just some lousy re-implementation of a website that you really wanted to flog through the app store for some reason, it probably isn't a big deal; but anybody who really needs the punch provided by running native can't necessarily ignore that.
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Some of the items in the chart aren't even currently being sold. Some of the items are imagined future products that don't exist and haven't been announced yet.
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So, when the iphone apps that are pushed for the larger screen first are unable to scale down to the smaller screen iphone, how is that not a problem?
There will be apps that are for the original screen size, the new screen size and the ipad. That seems somewhat fragmented to me.
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That fragmentation exists today. There are apps that exist only for the iPad, that won't run on any iPhone or iPod Touch. That's completely up to the developer, but it's not really any different than depending on a camera or GPS radio.
Apps have to scale down. (Score:4, Insightful)
So, when the iphone apps that are pushed for the larger screen first are unable to scale down to the smaller screen iphone, how is that not a problem?
Here you are hypothesizing some apps might exist only for the larger sized iPhone.
But remember, Apple has this walled garden - why would they accept an app that did not work on both sizes of iPhone?
Furthermore, apps HAVE to be able to resize down. When a call indicator is active the space for the app contracts.
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why would they accept an app that did not work on both sizes of iPhone?
To force people to buy a newer one maybe
Makes no sense (Score:2)
To force people to buy a newer one maybe
But forcing the app to allow both sizes means that something like 10x more people can buy an iPhone to use it (since device cost now ranges from free to $299, instead of just $299).
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There will be apps that are for the original screen size, the new screen size and the ipad. That seems somewhat fragmented to me.
Apps for the original screen size work on the new devices. You're hypothesising that there will be apps that work on the new screen size that don't work on the old, but it's unlikely - there's no benefit to the app developer to do that, and it's easy enough to support both.
There are no iPhone apps that don't run on the iPad... Support for iPhone apps is built in to the iPad.
For sure there are some apps that are iPad only, but that's always been true. They are very different devices - it's not sensible to fl
Erroneous Info (Score:4, Informative)
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Yeah, the whole screen size thing is a bit misleading. The 3GS is pretty much deprecated at this point, so that leaves you with iPhone/iPod touch resolutions of either 960x640 or 1136x640. Apple has added functionality to their development tools to support the stretched interface of the higher resolution, but for most apps it just means a bigger scrolling area. And then with the iPad it's either 1024x768 or 2048x1536, which is exactly double the resolution of 1024x768. All in all, it's not too hard to d
Not great (Score:5, Informative)
Most of these are things that iOS developers don't care about. For instance, Facetime over cellular: developers don't care about that, it's an Apple app, not an API, and evenif it was an API, you'd have to code for when it's unavailable anyway.
There are variations between the different models that developers have to be aware of, but they aren't covered in this chart. For instance, background modes are only available for ARMv7 devices. By and large, Apple have done a good job of shielding developers from these differences. I'm an iOS developer, and I very rarely have to even think about different device support. The two main ones are display size and display density - and Apple have only just announced the third display size ever, and they've only used two display densities ever. I can't really think of any platform outside of games consoles that are so homogenous.
Re:totally incoherent! (Score:5, Informative)
No, you idiot. A network connection being unavailable is NOT fragmentation.
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No it's not, and stop shouting.
You have to code everything that relies on the network on mobile devices to handle cases where it is unavailable because they frequently lose connectivity. Is an iPhone going through a tunnel fragmenting the platform because it doesn't have Facetime while an iPhone that isn't going through a tunnel does have Facetime? Of course not.
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You have to code everything that relies on the network on mobile devices to handle cases where it is unavailable
REALLY? Last I checked, mobile browsers "rely on the network" and they have NO special code to deal with when the net is down.
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You're an idiot. I just can't tell if you're being an idiot on purpose or if you just can't help it.
In case you really are that bindingly ignorant of both mobile browsers and common sense, yes, mobile browsers do include code to handle connectivity issues.
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You really think that browsers don't check to see if there is network connectivity?
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I just hid the button when making calls is not available. A grand total of three lines of code, including one line that was nothing more than a curly brace. Took me less than five minutes to code and test.
CONGRATULATIONS for DISPROVING YOUR OWN POINT, introducing HARDWARE DEPENDENCIES into your code.
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And we're complaining about Ah, backgrounding. That thing that requires a boatload of CPU power and RAM that the ARMv6 devices can't be counted on having.
At least complain about something really app-breakingly
par for the course for apple they also lockout 64 (Score:3, Interesting)
par for the course for apple they also lockout 64 bit only os on 64 bit hardware due to it only having 32bit EFI. But the same systems can boot 64 bit windows os.
Also the video cards don't have 64 bit drivers on the osx side but you can put in newer videos cards in them.
Also they can run the 64 bit only mac os x but you need to use the same tools that you use to run mac os x on a non apple pc.
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You're the sucker for buying their hardware, why do you blame others for your own failures?
"I bought a Ford car and it's junk because I can't just drop my Chevy engine into it"
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You can ML on any Mac that has 64-bit support in the chipset.
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the mac pro 1.1 needs the Chameleon bootloader to run 10.8
Need Page Impressions? (Score:3)
market fragmentation (Score:2)
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3GS, iPad1 and iPad mini should not be on the list (Score:3, Interesting)
Why are the 3GS (a 3 year old design), iPad1 (2.5 years old) and iPad mini (rumored device at this moment) on the list? Why aren't things like hardware acceleration, smooth scrolling and other basic features that didn't exist for Android as of a few months ago on the features list? Hell, why isn't front/back camera on that list - no complaints that the iPod touch even have an external speaker until v2?
As it stands there are basically three screen ratios (3:2, 4:3 and now 16:9), 3 device categories (phone/ipod/tablet). A whole lot less variety and scattered than Android where this kind of list would require a large spreadsheet to make sense of.
This list is a bit of a stretch. The phones that are currently being sold (4, 4S, 5) have very similar capabilities to each other, as do the tablets.
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The 3GS was being sold by Apple until two days ago.
The iPad 1 was the only iPad you could buy until March last year.
It's not about Android vs iOS..
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For the first two the answer seems obvious, an awful lot of people have them. If you are writing software you want people to use then that is kind of important.
Apple's challenge is to manage the competing problems of fragmentation and stagnation. To my mind stagnation is possibly a bigger issue for Apple. Personally I have a 3GS and even the 5 still seems like an extremely iterative rele
I don't get it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Starting with the retina display, the programming API's for the iPhone took a one-way trip away from utilizing absolute pixel measurements, and referring to screen positions by resolution-independant "points", instead. In this way, coupled with the usage of floating point values for screen positions instead of integers, code would be made entirely resolution independent, without having to inquire about the phone's physical pixel resolution. All of the iPhone screens up until that time, whether retina display or not, were considered to be the same dimensions in these "point" sizes, so the same code could look and work exactly the same both on pre-retina and post-retina displays (perhaps only being of higher fidelity on the latter).
Now Apple decides it's time to make a phone with an entirely different aspect ratio. Really, what was the point of bothering with the resolution-independent screen positioning in their API's in the first place if they were just going to go and produce a completely different screen size that the programmer is going to have to write extra code to account for anyways?
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Really, what was the point of bothering with the resolution-independent screen positioning in their API's in the first place if they were just going to go and produce a completely different screen size that the programmer is going to have to write extra code to account for anyways?
The word you're looking for here is compromise.
His Jobs-Ness was 100% absolutely against it, and such an extreme stance did seem to work well for Apple.
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The graphics API has not changed with respect to coordinates since the first public release. It has always used points, and they've always been floating point. What's changed is that with the retina displays the ration of pixels/points is no longer 1/1. And the iPad was released prior to the first retina display, so the need to handle different aspect ratios and physical dimensions already existed.
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Programmers don't have to do anything ... (Score:2)
Now Apple decides it's time to make a phone with an entirely different aspect ratio. Really, what was the point of bothering with the resolution-independent screen positioning in their API's in the first place if they were just going to go and produce a completely different screen size that the programmer is going to have to write extra code to account for anyways?
Programmers don't have to do anything. If they do nothing the app looks exactly the same on the iPhone 5 as it does on an iPhone 4. The app is centered on the display and the portion used is a pixel by pixel match, its even physically the same size given that pixels per inch is the same between the two devices. Its similar to what was done when running iPhone apps on an iPad. Of course in the iPhone 5 case the unused pixels are minimal.
So... (Score:2)
...newer hardware can access newer features. KTHX.
Screen Size (Score:2)
http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-4s/specs.html [apple.com]
http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-4/specs.html [apple.com]
A feature comparison != fragmentation (Score:4, Interesting)
Apparently the author of the "article" doesn't understand the distinction. I'm disappointed the editors let this one in.
Apple needs to support old hardware (Score:2)
Apple is disgraceful in the way that it dumps old hardware and software. There is a tremendous amount of older hardware which could easily run the new MacOS and iOS with some features turned of that is beyond the capability of the hardware. Very easy to program.
There is also a tremendous heritage of older software, particularly in the educational field, that is not being produced today that Apple should continue to support. Their abandonment of Classic, Rosetta, etc is pathetic.
They can make gobs of money o
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Getting Classic ported and working on Rosetta was probably deemed to be not worth the cost involved.
Rosetta was bought from a 3rd party and Apple didn't own it. I figured the acquisition of that company by IBM (if I remember correctly) could be the reason they dropped renewing it; or the costs involved or maybe the new owners didn't want that tech being used to run PPC on Intel...
Apple is still not nice about upgrades.
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How is Apple not nice about upgrades? ML supports every Intel Mac with 64-bit support in the chipset. Each version of iOS supports hardware that can reasonably run it. You'd think that after the iOS 4 "fiasco" that you'd applaud Apple not forcing upgrades onto hardware that can't really support them.
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I can understand your Mac complaints (to an extent...demanding Classic support at this point is just silly, especially since the machines that ran it still seem to run fine to me...I would know, since I have a Hi-Res PowerBook G4, which was the very last release before the Intel MacBook Pro), but their iOS support is pretty far beyond that of any of their competition. When I saw a chart about a year ago, every single one of their phones showed a history of having been supported through software updates and
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Wow. You're very greedy. Shame you don't also have the intelligence to turn that greed into enough wealth to get the hardware and software you want.
Now with Tint Control! (Score:2)
Fuck, I just got this iPad,and you're telling me it doesn't do panorama? Sigh. Anyone want a slightly used 16GB wifi tablet? Sadly, it has the A5X, instead of the A6, but the relentless march of progress doesn't stop for stragglers.
All reasonable offers excepted.
Fragmentation = Consumer Choice (Score:5, Insightful)
For the average user, fragmentation does not exist as a problem. It's like asking a Dell user; tell me, do you think the PC ecosystem is weakened by the system where you can buy an HP with a 17" screen or an Acer with a 21" one? Aren't you worried about fragmentation of the PC ecosystem?
Said user would look at you as if you were completely mad.
For the average, user the word fragmentation means nothing. Really, absolutely nothing.
There is an issue for developers, but even there the problems is relatively modest. Everyone writes to the Android specs of 2-3 years ago (mostly Gingerbread), and the world continues as normal.
And, the crazy bit is, of the top 100 apps, 98 are cross-platform anyway. Dropbox? Check. Angry Birds? Check. Evernote? Check. Every serious developer is already designing for both Android and iOS anyway (would anyone seriously consider building a mobile app designed to only ever being on one platform?), which means that any developer is already thinking about multiple form factors and resolution.
So: to finish, fragmentation is a wonderful phrase dreamt up by the depatment of FUD, but it bears about as much relevance to the real world as Elmer Fudd.
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Well put. I like choice - in RAM, screen size, and so on. I have a MacBook Air precisely because I've always enjoyed a minimalist computer setup. The thing is a dream for me because it runs the four applications I use all the time. It was the same thing with the Acer Linux netbook I had for about two years - no hard drive but just enough for Mozilla, Thunderbird, Angband and a text editor.
NOT fragmentation. (Score:3)
Fragmentation on Android is having a user base on a ton of different OS and hardware versions with wildy different feature sets and not being able to target software to run on all of them. As a result app developers focus on the majority device/OS target, often an ancient version of Android, which renders all the latest APIs Google has released pretty much useless.
With the majority of iOS devices in use able to upgrade to the latest OS version this developer headache just doesn't exist for Apple. It's easier to target the majority of devices, even rolling 'hybrid' apps that can selectively take advantage of newer features e.g. Retina display and the taller screen.
Choosing to deploy new features on new devices isn't fragmentation, it's a way of differentiating within a product line up.
And the last time I checked iOS 6 will be supported on the iPhone 3GS. A *three year* old phone.
iPhone 5 screen size support (Score:2)
Honestly, the screen size isn't a big deal.
As an example, I'm about to ship a new app to the app store, as soon as my company settles on a product name. Meanwhile, adding support for the new screen size involved... dropping a new launch image into the project.
Literally, that was it, not even a line of code. Since all my views already took into account different screen sizes to support properly laying out on both the iPhone and the iPad, it all happily resized itself to the new screen size exactly the way
Still no Siri for the iPad 2... WTF?? (Score:2)
Come on Apple... The iPad 2 and iPhone 4S have basically the same CPU, storage, and memory specifications. Both have a microphone and speakers. Siri should run fine on both platforms.
That said, why is Siri available for the last generation iPhone but not the last generation iPad?? It makes no damn sense.
whatever (Score:2)
You insensitive clod! (Score:4, Informative)
What about my Model 5150 IBM PC?
Seriously, fragmentation is an issue with current platforms. No one expects an API or UI to stand still across all but a small range of minor system releases.
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I guess that means PCs are fragmented.
Yep, they always have been, that's why you have seemingly endless configuration options for different applications - most often games - where as on say a gaming console you don't need them because the platform is consistent.
PCs are fragmented (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, yeah. PCs are pretty much the poster boy for a fragmented platform, even within the scope of hardware that could run the most recent major operating system version (e.g., not just "286 vs. modern x86-64 system".) Wintel PC fragmentation is certainly far worse than even Android fragmentation.
That's always been one of the selling points for more tightly controlled, homogenous platforms.
Re:PCs are fragmented (Score:5, Funny)
Uh, yeah. PCs are pretty much the poster boy for a fragmented platform,
Yeah, but every PC comes with a defragment utility.
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Yeah, because you paid a premium for a '286 three years ago. So relevant, your argument.
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The last two items on your chart (iPods) are not iOS devices.
iPod Touchs run iOS (how else would they be able to run most of the same apps as the iPhone?)
Re:Not to Developers (and your chart is flawed) (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, what? The iPod Touch definitely [wikipedia.org] uses [wikipedia.org] iOS [engadget.com].
Admittedly, I was expecting a rundown of what device supports what version of iOS as well as the particular features of that version, but that was just me.
Yes, correction issued... (Score:2)
I thought he was referring to the new iPods that look like iOS devices. Mostly because they listed "GPS: NO" without the same kind of side-note that the iPads had that they could use WiFi for location.
The list of which devices support which version of OS would be more interesting, but in practice developers do not support iOS versions more than three versions ago (at this point nothing older than iOS 4). The 3Gs can still update to iOS6 so really it will be a target for testing for at least two years more
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The latest version of the SDK can't target anything below iOS 4.3, which ARMv6 devices can't upgrade to (the farthest they go is iOS 4.2). At this point, ARMv6 devices (anything older than an iPhone 3GS) are unsupported by Apple's developer tools. In practice though, it's very difficult to make a case for supporting anything below iOS 5 for most applications these days, people upg
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Yes, they are. All generations of the iPod Touch run some incarnation of iOS, and have access to the app store and all that other sort of goodness. They more-or-less have hardware parity with their iPhone brothers, aside (sometimes) from ancillary features such as GPS, cellular radios, screen type (TN vs. IPS), and the like.
They all run the same programs, and function the same way.
(It was at this point that I stopped reading. If you can't keep
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Correction: Last two items are iPod touches... (Score:2)
I thought you were talking about the other new iPods that look like iOS devices.
It's still the case that iPod Touches can try to locate position from WiFi signals.
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The iPods are not iOS devices?? Apple says they are iOS devices: http://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/ [apple.com]
Figuring 'something' out from WiFi works only in dense urban environments, and even then isn't good enough for turn by turn navigation, which Apple claims is supported by the iPod Touch and iPad,
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Close, but not quite. I live in a rural area, and my iPad figures out locations pretty reasonably within 300 feet or so. Admittedly it will struggle with location in the middle of nowhere, but a "dense urban environment" is not required. Somewhere within line-of-sight to a house or two that has a wifi router (almo
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iPod Touches definitely are iOS devices, just without the cellular modems and with a light dusting of contempt from Apple when it comes to adding the punchier new hardware... Estimates are that 40-ish percent of iOS devices are ipod touches.
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that's it.
Other than the 3GS [apple.com] that is.
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what fragmentation? there are three phones supported by ios6
Which means that there are a few tens to hundreds of millions of actively used phones that will never even run the current OS... That's sort of what 'fragmentation' is all about...
To be sure, Android is substantially more fragmented even if you only look at 'currently-sold-and-supported-by-people-you've-heard-of', since there are multiple hardware OEMs shoving handsets out; but unless you start killswitching all your products, 'fragmentation' inevitably happens whenever people don't stop using the older one
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Phone that by this point are at least 3 years old if not 4.
HTC and Samsung won't support their android phones 6-12 months after release Apple is giving you 3-4 years of support and updates.
Apple is basically supporting 286 and 386 computers when Pentium's are the new norm.
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every kind of screen size and shape and aspect ratio, it's insane.
Yeah we've had THE EXACT SAME SITUATION ON THE DESKTOP.
FOR YEARS AND YEARS
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And if a desktop software developer complained about something as trivial as screen resolution variations, they'd be laughed out of the room.
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I don't think I'm a serious reporter :) And so I don't get paid for writing this, and don't have time to pretti-fy it for you.
WRONG (Score:2)
"fragmentation" is when you have to tell SOME of your users "you can't do that thing that others are doing"
"fragmentation" is DIVIDING THE USERS INTO GROUPS
Which is EXACTLY what happens when some users have a feature and some don't.
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"fragmentation" is when you have to tell SOME of your users "you can't do that thing that others are doing"
Indeed, and nothing on this list does that. The fact that I can't do flyover navigation on the 3GS has no effect on my solar prospecting tool.
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If your app depends on data delivered by other apps, you SURE DO care if those other apps are functional or not.
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If you need a class of apps that depends on a hardware feature, you sure as hell better buy hardware with that feature. If you don't, you're a retarded piece of shit, and you aren't suffering from "fragmentation".
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"Fragmentation" is a word, and depending on the context and how it's applied, it can refer to many things. Whether you're being obtuse or are just misinformed, it's clear that you're using it to refer to user fragmentation that occurs as the result of having different feature sets on different devices. Unfortunately, that is not the type of fragmentation that is in any way relevant to conversations about fragmentation in the mobile space. User fragmentation is desirable (to an extent), since it helps to dri
BIZZARRE!!! (Score:2)
user fragmentation that occurs as the result of having different feature sets on different devices. Unfortunately, that is not the type of fragmentation that is in any way relevant to conversations about fragmentation in the mobile space.
"in the mobile space" What a LOSER. These are JUST TINY COMPUTERS.
people are talking about device fragmentation, that is, the things dividing the devices into different groups for which the developers must separately develop.
So user fragmentation is when the devices are different, and device fragmentation is when the devices are different?
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"Whether you're being obtuse or are just misinformed..."
What a LOSER. These are JUST TINY COMPUTERS.
So user fragmentation is when the devices are different, and device fragmentation is when the devices are different?
Obtuse it is. Have fun trolling, kiddo.
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"fragmentation" is when you have to tell SOME of your users "you can't do that thing that others are doing"
"fragmentation" is DIVIDING THE USERS INTO GROUPS
First, find the knob marked "volume" and turn it down.
Then, find the one marked "brightness" and turn it up. I doubt if it will help, but we can all hope.
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Screen resolution is fragmentation.
Unless Apple thought to conveniently run older apps in the original screen size via letterboxing. What? They did? Well flip my lid!
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Ha! You'll make about "three fiddy" for every million users that- (Fry Squint) Ahhhhh, I see what you did there!
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EVERYONE cuts off older devices and technology. Nothing new here.
Re:Apple cuts off older devices and technology (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. And Apple does it less than almost anyone else. Before the iPhone, phone firmware updates were as rare as hen's teeth. I had a Treo 700p for many years and only got one OS update; none of my other cell phones ever had an update. On desktops, Apple supported the power PC chip for many years after they stopped selling it.
How often does an Android device (other than a Nexus) get an update? Hell, ignore updates, how many brand new Android devices come with an OS less than a year old?
There are many reasons to diss Apple. Not supporting older devices is not one if them.
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This traditionally is not called fragmentation
Tell us ALL ABOUT the "traditions" in this market that did not exist ten years ago.