Fragmentation of the Android market: Part 2

Yesterday I talked about the fragmentation of the Android market from a consumer's perspective. All the different Android versions on the market could potentially confuse consumers and stop them from making an Android phone purchase. Today I wanted to take a look at the fragmentation issue from an app developer's perspective.

Wired magazine has an article this week about Android's rapid growth and rising developer concerns. Android is now available on at least 12 phones and is scheduled to be released on many more over the next year. But this isn't necessarily good news for Android developers.

A slew of problems have made managing Android apps a “nightmare,” [developers] say, including three versions of the OS (Android 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0), custom firmware on many phones, and hardware differences between different models.

For users, it means apps in the store could be buggy, might not work well depending on their handsets, and could deliver a frustrating experience. Unaware of the increasing back-end complexity, they would then be more likely to leave bad reviews for those apps — a potentially lethal blow for small businesses, say developers.

It looks like the flexibility that Google has given to phone manufacturers with Android has created many different variations of its mobile platform. These variations may be small enough to go unnoticed by an average consumer, but they're large enough that they can cause a developer major headaches. Instead of working on new features and apps, developers find themselves busy debugging their existing apps across different Android phones.

This problem will only get worse as more and more different Android phones are released into the marketplace. iPhone developers don't have this problem since Apple tightly controls the iPhone platform and the operating system version. “Apple maintains an iron grip on what they do and there’s an advantage to that,” says Kelly Schrock, app developer. “IPhone developers don’t have to worry about fragmentation and creating apps for the iPhone is much easier.”

App developers are critical to the complementary network around a mobile platform. Where would the iPhone be without the developers that created the 100,000+ apps in the App Store? No matter how small or trivial, apps play a major role in the mobile world. If a slowdown in developer productivity leads to less new app releases on the Android platform, Google could very well see user share slip away as consumers switch to a platform with a better 'eco-system'.

At some point in the near term future, Google must address this problem. My recommendation: standardize the Android platform and enforce that standard. Once Google has gained a large enough foothold in the mobile market, it can command better control over the usage of Android with phone manufacturers. It can limit the number of OS versions, force software upgrades, set hardware standards, and standardize the user interface. All this will help to enhance the app experience for both users and developers on the Android platform.