Apple Highlights Low Fragmentation Among iOS Devices in Direct Jab at Android

[lordofthereef]

So Apple should spend the time (and resources) on supporting your 5+ year old hardware...? That doesn't make any sense from a business standpoint. Maybe Microsoft should test Windows 8 on my 6 year old PC...?

Well, no,. That isn't what is being said, I don't think. What IS being said is that some of the limitations are arbitrary. Apple wanted to drop support. If that is from a business standpoint, that's fine. But the fact of the matter is they strip features not because they have to, but because they can, to better differentiate devices.

And I have heard this Windows 8 argument so many times and just don't get it. Windows 8 will run just fine on your six year old pc, unless of course that PC was a barebones PC even six years ago. In fact, Windows 8 runs better on legacy hardware than perhaps any other Windows iteration ever did prior.

 

[mattbaar26]

Google is fixing that by releasing their apps outside of the android os like keyboard and maps, etc so that even though a use may not have the best os, they will still have all of their apps, what really matters, at the same level as anyone else

This doesn't even make sense as a knock against Apple.....

How many 1 year old devices have or will get the latest version of Android (minus rooting and ROMs)?

There are plenty of Android devices that get left out in the cold - heck most only receive a year's worth of software updates before being thrown out for the latest flagship. Apple might hold back a feature or two, but at least they support devices for 3 years.....(iPhone 4 may not get all the features, but it will still get iOS 7). Plus - if an Android device doesn't get the software update, it won't have ANY new features.....

Apple has the best "official" software support out there. Android can make up the difference with "unofficial" support (meaning ports and roms and such).

The difference is, a vast majority of iOS users can simply accept the OTA update when it comes out - a much smaller portion of Android users roots and roms their device for the latest Android version.

 

[oneMadRssn]

The Apple chart isn't entirely accurate. In terms of fragmentation, for developers making apps, you have to consider 3.5" and 4" variants, retina and non-retina variants. Android doesn't have this issue because it was designed to auto-scale to various screen sizes and resolutions from the begining (albiet, some argue it doesnt do a very good job at this).

The iOS6 segment should be further split up into
- iOS6 with 3.5" non-retina
- iOS6 with 3.5" retina
- iOS6 with 4" retina

At least for iPad, there are only two variants: retina and non-retina.

 

[pirg]

Google is fixing that by releasing their apps outside of the android os like keyboard and maps, etc so that even though a use may not have the best os, they will still have all of their apps, what really matters, at the same level as anyone else

That's based on the (false) assumption that android updates are only app updates. They are not.

 

[paul4339]

....
I've got three iOS devices running iOS 5. I haven't "accessed the App Store" with these three devices in MONTHS.

The people MOST likely to have accessed the App Store in the two weeks ending June 3 are , SURPRISE, the people that have RECENTLY purchased their iOS devices! And every one of those new devices are running (surprise again) iOS 6!
....

maybe two weeks is too short, but one would want take a recent sample over short period of time measured (weeks not months).

One wants to leave out the devices are mostly inactive (haven't accessed the app store in months) and try to get info on the active devices.

I'd bet the if you increased it to 3-4 weeks, the data would be roughly the same.

.

 

[TMay]

Apple is definitely better at offering updates to older devices, but App Store connections are a skewed measurement. I have an original iPod Touch, which can't be upgraded past iOS 3. It still works well for music and podcasts, but almost no apps support iOS 3 anymore, so I never connect to the App Store with it. I'm sure there are a lot of users in similar situations out there.

I have the first iPod Touch from October 2007. In 4 months, it will be 6 years old. There are still apps available, but most developers aren't interested in providing any new apps. You can still load music, video and such. For the record, there weren't that many iOS devices sold then, so that's a more relevant reason for the skewed numbers.

Not hard to figure out why developers have moved on.

 

[samac92]

Making an App work on 2.3+ is not at all hard in Android land. You target an API version - minimum and maximum and your app is pretty much guaranteed to work on those versions if you do it right. (OTOH if you are a sloppy developer or if you are developing something insanely complex then yes it's an effort - not insurmountable though.)

Hardware variations - yeah that now exists in iOS world as well - iPhone 4, 4S, 5, iPad mini, Retina, non-retina, and now there will possibly be a big screen iPhone. Not all devices have all features. I don't see how that is any different from Android.

The problem is the old version of Android do not have the necessary APIs to do certain things. For example Google is only recently working on providing the necessary APIs for low latency audio, which are necessary for audio creation apps. It would be impossible to create an app like Garageband that works on the majority of devices. Take a look at the play store, they just don't exist. Another example is the BBC's radio app, which requires Android 4.0 and above because previous versions don't have HLS support, and it arrived 6 months later than the iOS version because as the developer says "The most popular Android operating system in production today is version 2.2, which is several releases back, and so that fragmentation's introduced more of a challenge."

And are you seriously suggesting the number of iOS devices is anywhere near comparable with the thousands of variations of Android devices?

 

[parapup]

All iPhone apps work on the 5 even if not updated for the screen size, there is basically no problem in the ios world when it comes to this. Not to mention there is no big screened iPhone.

Thus, as I said no different from Android. (Except, there is - on iOS, iPhone 5 will show older apps centered - on Android they are scaled automatically.

 

[nagromme]

I like Apple and I like iOS but I switched long ago because I simply got tired of the new versions of the OS being available on my device, but certain features not being backwards compatible. My final straw on that was no stock voice dictation on iPhone 4. There was no hardware limitation preventing it, they simply wanted to make people who desired that feature buy a new phone...and so I did. An Android phone that supports ALL new features that the hardware is capable of (Nexus of course).

I miss iOS sometimes, but I tried going back to iPhone and I missed Android more.

Let's see how your device is supported in the long-term. The history of Android devices getting timely updates is FAR worse than iOS. I hope your gamble doesn't come back to bite you.

P.S. There is NO pattern of Apple holding back features to generate sales. Sometimes Apple holds back a feature, and we can only guess why--maybe some evil reason. More often, they hold it back for very good hardware reasons that bloggers ignore, creating a false narrative. But also, Apple VERY OFTEN retroactively brings a new feature to an old device. There is no one-sided pattern. (There is a strong pattern of Android devices not getting updated.)

And just because a feature "could work" in theory on a given device doesn't mean it can work equally well. An older iPhone often has less RAM and/or slower CPU. On the case of your iPhone 4, I believe it lacked noise-cancelation that Siri used.

Whatever the reason, if a significantly larger number of people were going to have a problem with Siri on the 4, Apple absolutely had to hold the feature back: it was a young system at a critical early phase, and the tech press would have beaten it to death.

 

[lordofthereef]

That's based on the (false) assumption that android updates are only app updates. They are not.

Huh? It's a step in the right direction. I don't think anything is being assumed here. Perhaps the terminology of "fixing this" was incorrect. "Improving this" might have worked better. But I don't think anyone thinks updating the keybaord application is going to magically fix OS level issues. What it will do, however, is give people stuck on older version of Android some of the features Google has been working on and improving.

It's clear Google realizes this is a problem and it's clear they are taking steps to reduce/minimize its effects. With all of the vanilla Android handsets we have seen launch this year alone, I would say this is going to be a completely different ballgame in the next couple of years.

 

[pirg]

Huh? It's a step in the right direction. I don't think anything is being assumed here. Perhaps the terminology of "fixing this" was incorrect. "Improving this" might have worked better. But I don't think anyone thinks updating the keybaord application is going to magically fix OS level issues. What it will do, however, is give people stuck on older version of Android some of the features Google has been working on and improving.

It's clear Google realizes this is a problem and it's clear they are taking steps to reduce/minimize its effects. With all of the vanilla Android handsets we have seen launch this year alone, I would say this is going to be a completely different ballgame in the next couple of years.

Oh yeah it's an improvement of course, but again app updates are a miniscule part of android os updates. So yes it's "improving" it. No it's not anywhere close to fixed and won't be for a long time.

 

[Casiotone]

I don't understand how Android fans keep trying to dismiss this obvious iOS advantage by saying things like "But Siri and some other system features are not available on older devices like the iPhone 4!". I've seen that repeated in many comments about this news.

The lack of Siri or flyover on the iPhone 4 does not impede the ability for developers to easily target nearly 100% of the iOS market by making iOS 5 or 6 compatible apps, which is a very different picture than what Android devs have to go through if they want to maximize the number of users they can reach.

Couple that with the fact that many of the cheap crippled Android phones still sold today are barely used as smartphones, and that Android users are less likely to pay for software.

The fact is, the iOS appstore still remains to be a much more viable and profitable market for devs than Android. It doesn't matter that Android has the majority of market share.

 

[lordofthereef]

Let's see how your device is supported in the long-term. The history of Android devices getting timely updates is FAR worse than iOS. I hope your gamble doesn't come back to bite you.

P.S. There is NO pattern of Apple holding back features to generate sales. Sometimes Apple holds back a feature, and we can only guess why--maybe some evil reason. More often, they hold it back for very good hardware reasons that bloggers ignore, creating a false narrative. But also, Apple VERY OFTEN retroactively brings a new feature to an old device. There is no one-sided pattern.

You assume it wasn't one of the flagship Androids that WILL be getting updates. You also assume it's not simply a Nexus device. You see, users here are more informed than the average Joe on the street. I fully expect someone who posts here to have done their research. There are plenty of phones available now that are receiving full support.

The only way we will have evidence is if someone goes out and says that they are internally holding back features to boost sales. I think the fact that the dev community ported Siri to the iPhone 4 is pretty solid evidence that Siri was reserved for the device to differentiate it from its predecessor. But this seems to have subsided with the iPhone 5, and perhaps even the 5S (we won't know until later), which is great.

 

[ssspinball]

Android is the new Windows

Windows has never been as fragmented as Android.

 

[parapup]

The problem is the old version of Android do not have the necessary APIs to do certain things. For example Google is only recently working on providing the necessary APIs for low latency audio, which are necessary for audio creation apps. It would be impossible to create an app like Garageband that works on the majority of devices. Take a look at the play store, they just don't exist. Another example is the BBC's radio app, which requires Android 4.0 and above because previous versions don't have HLS support, and it arrived 6 months later than the iOS version because as the developer says "The most popular Android operating system in production today is version 2.2, which is several releases back, and so that fragmentation's introduced more of a challenge."

And are you seriously suggesting the number of iOS devices is anywhere near comparable with the thousands of variations of Android devices?

You are focusing on a handful of nice apps there though. Most apps don't care about those things and work just fine on 2.2 thru 4.2. Also close to 60% Android devices are no 4.0+ so it is even less of a problem for those niche apps. BBC app - nothing prevented them from rolling their own, using an 3rd party SDK or just plain falling back to RTSP. But if they decided to be sloppy and blame Android - hey it's their choice!

 

[jclardy]

Yeah but all of iOS's new features aren't available on all devices. iOS will have even more features that won't be available on older devices.

That isn't the point though - you have all the end user features you paid for in the first place. The point is that developers can actually use new API's and make apps that feel like they are a part of the phone, rather than tacked on (Like an app built to support 2.2 on Android.)

 

[mdelvecchio]

Yeah but all of iOS's new features aren't available on all devices. iOS will have even more features that won't be available on older devices.

which isnt what is referred to when developers discuss fragmentation (and this chart is aimed toward app developers). devs are concerned with having to support too many different versions of a platform -- which means more code forking and work. that an iphone4 user doesnt get the same blur effect as an iphone5 user is not a big deal.

 

[ssspinball]

If you look at feature set of the OSes - Android 2.3 had all of the features of iOS7 So big deal Apple - same OS from 2007-2013 and ONE relatively significant iOS7 update that even tries to match Android 2.3!

Besides, Android people don't need to wait for an OS update to update most of their OS - it's called modularization peeps! (Chrome, Google Services(GMail, Play Store, various frameworks), Launchers, Keyboards - everything updates outside of the OS. So yeah, big deal with the numbers Apple - they don't mean as much as you make it sound they do.

WHOOOSH (and nice troll). I can tell you aren't a developer. APIs matter.

On Android you get lowest common denominator. On iOS, devs can target the newest and greatest APIs within weeks of an OS release.

 

[gatearray]

My Gosh! who dubbed those Android codenames?

A woman, no doubt, which is ironic because high school android lovers seem to fancy themselves as laser-shooting tough guys, lol!

Enjoy that fro-yo and chocolate eclairs, girls— although it's just more empty calories that'll go straight to your thighs, bikini season is coming up you know!

 

[duffman9000]

Google is fixing that by releasing their apps outside of the android os like keyboard and maps, etc so that even though a use may not have the best os, they will still have all of their apps, what really matters, at the same level as anyone else

What about the Android Browser? For those who didn't experience this mess, Chrome was a flaming POS when it was first released on Android. On a Nexus 7, Google didn't include the Browser anymore and I had to jump through hoops to get it installed. Even then, Browser still had issues since it wasn't optimized for the Nexus 7. It still was better than Chrome.

I played with a HTC One with Chrome installed when the phone was released and Chrome still had some of the same damn annoying issues. And before all the droid tards flame me go ahead and search for Chrome issues on Android when it was released. Words like "I can't believe this was released" ring a bell.

 

[2bikes]

Honestly I wish they had a way to not include all those crappy pre-paid android phones that probably stuck on Gingerbread and to me are not true smartphones. That way we could get a better look at fragmentation and see where Android really sits in terms of both OS version and market share.

Or a better way is to only show devices less than 3 years old. Does Android still allow people like Samsung or whoever to put Gingerbread on a new phone? If not this would be a great metric.

Should the sales numbers and market dominance looked at the same way? Without nonsmart smartphones?

 

[jdawgnoonan]

I don't understand how Android fans keep trying to dismiss this obvious iOS advantage by saying things like "But Siri and some other system features are not available on older devices like the iPhone 4!". I've seen that repeated in many comments about this news.

The lack of Siri or flyover on the iPhone 4 does not impede the ability for developers to easily target nearly 100% of the iOS market by making iOS 5 or 6 compatible apps, which is a very different picture than what Android devs have to go through if they want to maximize the number of users they can reach.

Couple that with the fact that many of the cheap crippled Android phones still sold today are barely used as smartphones, and that Android users are less likely to pay for software.

The fact is, the iOS appstore still remains to be a much more viable and profitable market for devs than Android. It doesn't matter that Android has the majority of market share.

I always find it funny that instead of releasing a newly designed mid range phone Apple sells a 3 year old outdated phone.

 

[malohkan]

If you look at feature set of the OSes - Android 2.3 had all of the features of iOS7 So big deal Apple - same OS from 2007-2013 and ONE relatively significant iOS7 update that even tries to match Android 2.3!

Besides, Android people don't need to wait for an OS update to update most of their OS - it's called modularization peeps! (Chrome, Google Services(GMail, Play Store, various frameworks), Launchers, Keyboards - everything updates outside of the OS. So yeah, big deal with the numbers Apple - they don't mean as much as you make it sound they do.

As an app/web developer, I can say this does not help me at all. The stock Web browser for Android 2.3 is the IE6 of web browsers. It's terrible at all things and makes my life miserable. Having to tell Android users, "sorry, download FireFox, by the way Chrome isn't even available for your phone" feels really cheesy. It's the same conversation we've had with years with users about moving away from IE6. You can boast your "modularization" all you want, but it doesn't do the trick. Even Android 4 running Chrome has live bugs that break my app. The iPhone 4 is the "free" phone on the major networks now, and it'll run iOS7 and give developers access to all the latest APIs, without any browser bugs.

As a developer, I can tell you the Android fragmentation is actually worse for me than Apple is making it sound. Once I got my iOS app working on my own iPhone, I was able to extend support to iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, using iOS 5 and 6 with only 3 extra hours of work.

I've been building an equivalent web-app while working with 3 Android phones that my friends own, and I've been spending weeks fighting browser bugs that exist in the latest versions of the OS/software that their phones allow. No version of iOS Safari has any of these bugs that I'm having to deal with. Once I got it working on my desktop, it already worked in iOS Safari. No browser bugs, latest API's and browser capabilities all there on the iPhone 4. It still doesn't work right on any of the Android phones I can get my hands on, and they all have different issues.

The fragmentation is a nightmare for me. I really truly want all of my friends to be able to enjoy my work and give them an excellent product, but I'm spending so much time and frustration fighting these fragmentation issues that I'm questioning whether it's even worth it. All this time I could be spending building new features for iOS users, I'm spending fighting Android browser bugs.

Edit: sorry for sounding like such a grumpy pants, but so many people don't understand why more developers don't treat Android as an equal platform when it comes to release dates. The hard truth is that it takes a LOT more time and effort to get quality work for Android than it does for iOS.

 

[Berserker-UK]

Wow, over a third using an OS that's over 2 years old

It's all down to perspective. I'm still using Snow Leopard (also due to not being able to upgrade). That's nearly 4 years old!

 

[lordofthereef]

I don't understand how Android fans keep trying to dismiss this obvious iOS advantage by saying things like "But Siri and some other system features are not available on older devices like the iPhone 4!". I've seen that repeated in many comments about this news.

The lack of Siri or flyover on the iPhone 4 does not impede the ability for developers to easily target nearly 100% of the iOS market by making iOS 5 or 6 compatible apps, which is a very different picture than what Android devs have to go through if they want to maximize the number of users they can reach.

Couple that with the fact that many of the cheap crippled Android phones still sold today are barely used as smartphones, and that Android users are less likely to pay for software.

The fact is, the iOS appstore still remains to be a much more viable and profitable market for devs than Android. It doesn't matter that Android has the majority of market share.

The bottom line is, if you are talking from a user perspective, it is relevant that key features seem to vanish from older iOS devices, and that is where I see most people going with this argument. If you are talking from a developer perspective, I am not even sure why we are so concerned about cheap devices. Do you think the majority of users who are buying a $75 (off contract) Android handset are worried about the apps? If they spend $20 in apps, that is almost a third of the cost of their handset. In other words, these aren't the people buying your apps anyway, so developers shouldn't be targeting app sales towards them, much like iOS developers don't target app sales towards older devices. I have seen a handful of games that don't support the 3GS, some even the iPhone 4 for this very reason. And it has nothing to do with fragmentation, and everything to do with simple hardware limitations.