Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

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This article is obviously biased toward extolling the advantages of iOS's uniformness, yet the best example it takes to argue against Android's fragmentation is an application that fails to support only 7.8% of the Android market! How is this a proof that fragmentation is causing a "shocking toll"?

For the curious, I decompiled this "Temple Run" app. It requires Android 2.2 or higher, because its AndroidManifest.xml declares the use of OpenGL ES 2.0 which was introduced in that version of Android. (And the app's minimum API level is Android 2.1.) The app also needs android.hardware.sensor.accelerometer and android.hardware.touchscreen.multitouch, but virtually all Android 2.2 devices have these capabilities.

So, effectively, Temple Run works on any Android 2.2+ device, which represents 92.2% of the devices in the wild: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve... When the developer says they support 707 of the 1443 unique devices on Android Market, this means that these 707 devices represent 92.2% of the market, whereas the article tries to present this as "only half the market is supported".

Yet another article written by an iOS fanboy trying to unfairly depict the state of the Android ecosystem... Nothing to see here.

The problem is that a lot of Android devices that claim to support these specs do so in buggy and inconsistent ways. GL shaders, for instance, sometimes have to be tweaked for individual devices.

GL shaders have to be tweaked on every platform, and every device. The only thing that's consistent about them is that they're inconsistent everywhere. For example, certain drivers will reject shaders using integer literals where floats are expected, others won't; different GPUs will also behave different with respect to precision, or with how they handle a NaN in math.

And iOS has a smaller set of GPUs, and a common compression scheme (PVR)

That's GPU "fragmentation." You have multiple hardware/firmware/driver implementations of OpenGL. Unless you prescribe a GPU and software stack, you will always find things that slip past compatibility tests.

I disagree wholeheartedly, this is one of the least biased articles on iOS vs Android I have ever read.

And while I have yet to experience a single app that's not working on my not exactly new Desire Z with stock ROM (2.3.3?) apart from some games that are tabler-only), I do agree on the problem part.

The happy users won't all rate, but the unhappy ones are usually quick to downrate. A frustration I can understand as someone who used a HTC Tattoo with 1.6 for a while.

Do you normally get your iOS vs Android articles from Daring Fireball or something? How this one can compare favorably is disturbing.

This article is terrible.

I agree with what you're saying...mostly. However, there IS a problem with devices that ONLY meet the requirements in buggy ways due to manufacturer alterations/additions. Its silly to ignore this problem and claim it doesn't exist.

Who claims it doesn't exist? I think people are rightly saying that it is hardly the hysterical disaster that some -- for self-serving reasons -- try to present it as.

Android has compatibility tests, and they keep growing in scope and value. OpenGL ES 2.0, for instance, demands certain givens that some devices don't actually meet -- those devices should be removed from OpenGL ES 2.0 compatibility (which, as a manifest directive, would eliminate most games from being available).

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