Android fragmentation - the good and the bad

Google owned Android is biggest used mobile OS. It has one thing that separates it from IOS, windows, symbian etc is that it's open source, meaning the code is available for manufacturers and they can tweak the OS by giving more options, or by using different skins and use their version of android in their phones.
Now because of android's openness 100s of manufacturers launch new phones with their version of android. This can now have many good thing but have many problems too.

What's good?

Manufacturers often give users features that vanilla android doesn't gives. These can be small tweaks like reboot option in power menu or a battery percentage indicator in status bar or big features like multi window or theme support. Some manufacturers give users ability to create folders, hide apps, reorder apps in their stock launcher, all of which stock android doesn't support

Many developers used open source nature of android and created their versions or ROMS of android. They pushed android to it's boundaries and gave features that users always wished for like floating windows or pie controls etc. ROMS allowed users to customise their phone at many levels and not just changing wallpapers. All of these ROMS can have these features because they have system admin rights to modify files at administrator level. So an old phone which will be pretty much dead because OEM didn't push the system update, ROMS got you covered and now your old phone can have some of the new functionality or at least it would look a little better

Developers also created custom kernels which allowed users to underclock, overclock, undervolt, overvolt etc so if you had an old phone which didn't run temple run after over clocking it could and it did. Custom kernels allowed users to tweak their displays sound and every hardware aspect of their phone. So users can optimise their phone if they want to use it for gaming or want a better battery life. All of this was because of custom recoveries which allowed users to flash files directly to system.

Many times google realised and learnt from OEMs and custom ROMS and then gave those features in stock android. All this openness helped google to evolve and add new features. And it still learns from other OEMS and ROM developers.

All this goodness ends here. Being open source has it's many demerits too.

What are the problems?

All these manufacturers creating their own versions of android with different devices and it keeps on increasing. It leads to fragmentation. fragmentation is the result of different OEMs adapting android OS for their own devices. These devices has been modify android to run on their hardware. It is not the same version of OS that runs on other manufacturer's devices, even if the version number is the same.

• Not all the apps available in the playstore are compatible with the different versions or ranges of Android phone. for example if have a phone with a nvidia chip chances are there are some games won't run or there will be games that will only run on the phones with that chip because game developer has to not only optimize its game according to screen resolution (which ranges from HD to 2k) but every piece of hardware available on phone. because of this most of the developers prefer launching their apps to IOS only because you have only 10 devices, instead of 10.000s all with different hardware and screen size and resolution in case of android. this is the reason IOS users gets new app updates and features first (eg: snapchat’s animated thingy is available to all ios devices. then it was updated for android too but only few devices have that feature)

• Another problem is system update and android version numbers. because of shit load of devices of which google has no control on updates, these devices rely on their manufacturers and carrier to update their phone. and its likely your 2 year old phone is going to get update because manufacturer don't give a shit about it and is only concerned about its latest flagship device.
  
  
  

  

  look at the latest version of android that is marshmallow. its not even 1% . people are rejoicing and still waiting for lollipop. Gingerbread took almost six months for it to be adopted by all Android devices

  

  now take a look at the IOS distribution numbers, latest version has reached 64% and the time it took to adopt was very less

  
  
• Now you may say you don't need latest version you're happy with lollipop or kitkat or your custom ROM. but its not just features latest version brings. each update fixes many faults of previous releases also it fixes security patches which can make device vulnerable to attacks. because of this google will release monthly security patch OTAs but it will again depend upon your OEM.
  
  
• Another problem is bloatware, if you buy a nexus device you get basic google apps with playstore. but if you buy a samsung device you will get all the same google apps but Samsung's versions of similar apps too. which you cant uninstall this just takes up space on your device

There you have i tried to list out all i could think of. If you think anything is missing or like to add. leave a comment below