The official Twitter app for Android was announced and only going to be available for Android 2.1. This is just another case of Android’s lingering fragmentation problem. How so?
Android is available in several different versions: At the time 27.3% of devices were running 2.1; 2.7% were running 2.0.1, and nearly 70% of the devices being used were on either Android 1.5 or 1.6. That means that over 70% of Android users cannot use the Twitter app. What’s also amazing about this is that Google, the makers of the Android OS for mobile phones, has not updated it’s web site in several months. So users cannot get the updates to their mobile OS.
Android - Logo
Google’s Android is an operating software platform used on mobile devices like mobile phones. It is based on the Linux operating system. Android was developed by Google in conjunction with the Open Handset Alliance. Among it’s main features is that it allows developers to write managed code in Java.
From the user perspective the majority of Android based mobile phones won’t be able to access the Twitter app, nor will they be able to access some of the newer features that have been rolled out with the upgraded versions of Android. But one should also understand that some manufactureres of mobile phone are running custom builds of Android and haven’t upgraded yet; this means that they are running on previous versions of the Android OS, not the most current one. But still developers will be looking for a way to deal with the fragmentation issue.
New Android devices are being developed and shipped in stock. Companies like HTC, Samsung, Dell, Verizon and others have mobile phones on the way. However, each has different hardware, and different software, than the others. This is part of the fragmentation problem that developers are concerned about. Open source may be good, but if every company is doing it’s own thing…then that leads to fragmentation of the open source development product. Google will not be able to contain the problem easily unless it can put some restrictions on the use of their open source program. But then it wouldn’t be open source would it?
Here is a breakdown of the usage per Android version.
Android Statistics
Source: TechCrunch
