Jason Henry/The Bay Citizen
Manufacturers of Android phones and the carriers decide which version of Android goes on their phones and tablets, and as a result, many different devices are not running the same version of Android. For businesses that make apps, that often means they have to make multiple versions of the same app to work on different devices. For customers, the end result is that some Android devices are compatible with certain apps, while others are not. Hence the term fragmentation — a splintered experience as opposed to a tidy software ecosystem, like Apple’s iOS.
Ice Cream Sandwich bridges the gap between Android tablets and smartphones; now software makers can write apps that scale easily to both types of products. Nvidia, the chipmaker whose Tegra processor is found in the Asus Transformer, which runs Ice Cream Sandwich, thinks this solves fragmentation.
“Ice Cream Sandwich pulls it back together,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, in a recent interview. He said that Android’s real fragmentation occurred when there was a separate Android operating system (called Honeycomb) just for tablets, and now that Ice Cream Sandwich unifies tablets and phones, it fixes the problem. “Every Android device is basically the same with Ice Cream Sandwich.”
But the new Android version doesn’t change the fact that carriers and manufacturers still decide when Android devices get software updates. And because of their inconsistencies, Android will remain largely fragmented.
App developers expect fragmentation will not go away. “The phone fragmentation is insane,” said Andreas Schobel, co-founder of Catch.com, a start-up that makes both iPhone and Android apps. He said that he disagreed with the idea that Ice Cream Sandwich remedied this issue just because it unified Android tablets and smartphones.
Motorola has enough handsets running different versions of Android to fill a long chart, which reveals that only four devices in its portfolio will get Ice Cream Sandwich, while dozens of others won’t. Many of the devices listed in its chart are still waiting to get Android Froyo, which was released in 2010.
Part of the reason it takes so long for manufacturers to get up to speed is the rigorous certification process for devices. Sony Ericsson published a 1,700-word blog post documenting the testing and certification procedure for Android releases before they actually show up as an update on your mobile device.