Is Android fragmentation all that bad?

Android supports a huge range of devices, from 2.5 inch phone screens to full-sized, high-definition television sets. From a user perspective, it's a great way to get your daily dose of app goodness from all of the Android-powered devices you own. For a developer, this can be a nightmare. Different layouts are needed to make an application useful for all of these devices. There are certain APIs that become deprecated over time, while newer APIs become available for newer versions of Android. Keeping track of compatibility issues while retaining the feature set of an application can become an extremely time consuming job.

With the release of Android 3.0 (more commonly known as Honeycomb), new design concepts such as the action bar and on-screen navigation controls became standard. Developers needed to look at their applications to make sure they would scale correctly to fit these much larger devices. In some cases, a different version of the application was released into the market just to cover the tablet user base.

So, if you're a programmer, life has just become a lot more difficult. Because of this range of devices, the amount of work for even a simple application has just skyrocketed. But is this so bad? In my opinion, this is actually a shift in the right direction, especially with the introduction of Android 4.0 (or Ice Cream Sandwich). The main reason for my opinion is that it forces developers to put more time into the design of their application, resulting in a more polished user experience.

Making an application that scales to the whole range of Android devices is no easy task, but it makes the whole android experience more cohesive among applications. The Fragment, which was introduced with Honeycomb, basically replaces the menu button in Android tablets. Google has also released a backwards compatible API to support all devices with this feature. When a user opens an app for the first time, it needs to be intuitive enough to be useful at that very moment. This doesn't mean all apps need to look the same. They can be completely different, but offer the same basic functions of operation.

With the release of Android 4.0, Google is hoping to clean up some of the fragmentation issues by using the same OS for tablets and phones. The tools are there for developers to use and even though the implementation is becoming more difficult, better apps are the result. And everyone loves better apps.