We Need to Talk About Android

Re:We Need to Talk About Android by ajross on Wednesday March 07, 2012 @12:09AM (#3674355)

Chrome is a beta released three weeks ago. And while I like it, it's a long way from being production quality. Are there any other examples of ICS-only software? Anywhere? Really the only serious bump in the Android API has been Froyo. There are lots of apps that require Froyo. Honestly I can't think of a single one (other than trial stuff like Chrome or niche things like handset-specific root tools, etc...) that requires even Gingerbread, much less ICS.

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Re:We Need to Talk About Android by huxley on Wednesday March 07, 2012 @11:19AM (#3675949)

I thought that was part of what Frasier is getting at, fragmentation gets you both coming and going.

Both ICS and iOS 5 were released at about the same time, iOS 5 is now the majority OS for iOS devices. On the other hand, ICS is available on about minuscule percentage of Android devices.

Software written for ICS won't work on the vast majority of devices and there is little incentive to write for ICS (which will keep hurting Android tablets).

Developers can start taking advantage of iOS 5 APIs today and incentive is growing. At this rate, iOS 6 will be the majority OS on iOS before ICS gets that title for Android.

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Re:We Need to Talk About Android by bad_user on Wednesday March 07, 2012 @11:59AM (#3676088)

Except that you can build apps that are optimized for ICS and that degrade nicely for older versions / less capable devices.

That's how smart developers always operated. I remember when Id's Quake 1 first appeared ... I could play it on a 2 year old Pentium processor on MS-DOS 6.22, even though Windows 95 was capturing the headlights.

You can start taking advantage of ICS APIs today. It's more work because you have to test and workaround older versions too, but the thing that differentiates Android from other frameworks is that it was built with degradation in mind.

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Re:We Need to Talk About Android by ajross on Wednesday March 07, 2012 @11:45AM (#3676035)

Which is a valid point, I think. New features don't get adopted quickly in Android apps because of the need to support legacy handsets (one big one was the gesture support that landed in Gingerbread -- Froyo-compatible apps can't use it, or must use it only for non-critical functionality).

But no, that was clearly not Frasier's point at all. "With Android [...] even Google's own software [...] only runs on the absolute latest version." is a complaint that recent software isn't backwards compatible. And that's just wrong.

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