What I'm curious about why it is fragmentation is such an issue on mobile devices, when it was never this big a deal on desktops. Outside of cutting-edge 3D games, Windows developers don't need to have 100 laptops to test all the different hardware permutations for their software.
> What I'm curious about is why is fragmentation such an issue on mobile devices, when it was never this big a deal on desktops.
Stable APIs and abstractions, better renderers, ability not to go fullscreen and nobody caring about dpi. Resolutions changed very slowly, especially before the 00s and 3D games. Also culture, somewhat, probably: if the game does not work due to a bizarre combination of drivers it's the users problem.
And it's definitely not true that "it was never this big a deal on desktops", stable hardware target is regularly mentioned as a reason to go console by developers.
Heck it was never a big deal is factually incorrect.
IT is STILL a big deal:
Fragmentation means your ATI card not working one day, or your novice user having to go dig through pages of support to figure out how to debug a faulty driver.
Or its your printer not working on XP, but working on 7 || your games being unplayable on one set up and working on another without a hiccup || any of a massive set of issues that people take for granted when they have to deal with PCs.
Fragmentation is an issue, its just that people have gotten used to it and familiar with it.
I would say its a much of a deal on mobile as it is on desktop. The problem is how badly Android is doing here compared to Apple. If there were only Android, the problem would be the same for the developers, but they'd accept it in return for the income.
Right now, if you can only target one platform, it's a no-brainer against Android.
Note that you say "outside of cutting-edge 3D games", but remember that games are a significant part of apps. And cutting-edge on an Android device doesn't have to mean that much.
Lastly, consider how console game sales are doing compared to PC game sales. And how developers tend to treat PC game development as a result.
- Dell, HP, Compaq, Acer, etc didn't invent entirely new UI's for the computers they sold: everybody's OS looked basically identical and had similar interface elements and metaphors.
- Screen sizes and resolutions increased slowly and didn't involve taking over the entire screen as with smartphones. Software that previously took up the whole screen at 1024x768 simply ran as a smaller window at 2560x1440 and wasn't forced to scale up to full screen.
Android apps that are designed for smaller screens leave black space on the new mega-screened phones. Users pan you in the reviews pretty hard for this, though. The expectations for apps that conform properly to every phone are a lot higher than they used to be on early PCs, I think.
I don't think early PC games had such a direct feedback mechanism as the Android store has.
Evil developer didn't allow his app to run on your phone? Punishing him is only 2 clicks away!
App doesn't have a feature you want? Blackmailing the author by giving him a 1 star review is only 2 clicks away!
Reminds me a bit of the restaurants complaining about online reviews.
My app was written for the G1 by a friend on a correspondingly early version of the SDK back when the G1 was the only Android handset, and it doesn't scale up to full screen on the bigger phones. It might be the case that they've released autoscaling and it just wasn't around when it was developed, or it might just be that he used the SDK improperly and neglected some existing autoscaling options.
Yes, as you guessed, the problem you're seeing is because the app was developed for a very early version of the Android API. Here's how to fix the app (requires a recompile):
"If your [applications] manifest file has either android:minSdkVersion or android:targetSdkVersion set to "4" or higher, then the Android system will scale your application's layout and assets to fit the current device screen, whether the device screen is smaller or larger than the one for which you originally designed your application. As such, you should always test your application on real or virtual devices with various screen sizes and densities."
I was going to make this exact post. I realized that:
1. a lot of this is handled by APIs
2. we still have to deal with hardware issues, such as having the correct video driver and a correctly configured OS to play non-casual videogames. Some programs refuse to work with certain hardware, like Dungeon Master 2 not running with Creative sound cards.
