Fragmentation has always been Android’s greatest bugbear, and it remains an issue, confessed Google engineers at this week’s I/O conference. However, Android’s engineering director Dave Burke pledged that his team has made it a priority to address the issue and make the updating process more timely and streamlined.
During a fireside chat session at the event, 11 members of the Android team answered developers’ questions, and a key theme was how to match the rapid pace of innovation with a coordinated updating approach, so that developers and OEMs get the upsides of Google’s enhancements program, rather than the penalties ‘ having to support multiple releases and live with an unpredictable updates schedule.
Currently, there can be months between the first products getting a new OS release or feature ‘ typically Google’s own Nexus devices ‘ and the last, confusing users and developers. There are stillms of devices running ageing Android releases such as 2.2 Froyo and 2.3 Gingerbread, which were introduced in May and December 2010 respectively.
“This is something we think about a lot,” said Burke, as reported by CNet, “And we’re working internally to streamline the development process and make the software more layered.”
He said that, by layering software, chip and device makers will be able to support updates more quickly, and apply changes just to certain aspects of the software for greater speed and flexibility. He also said Google needs to work on understanding the many and diverse types of hardware which run its OS ‘ from emerging market models which only have the hardware capacity to support Gingerbread, to new gadgets optimized for applications that require a new OS. Both ends of the scale require attention, and Burke said: “We’re trying to make Android more efficient so that even entry level smartphones can use the software.’
Google was also trying to push its line that its own Nexus has the ‘purest’ Android experience and can save developers and users from all the complexities of OEMs’ own-look overlays, such as Samsung TouchWiz. The only new hardware to feature at I/O was a version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 with the vanilla Android user interface, and none of the Korean vendor’s usual additions ‘ though this model is not actually Nexus-branded.
Google, having failed in its attempt to impose a common look and feel on partners by force, with the Honeycomb tablet release, is now trying to woo OEMs to its own UI by promising a smoother and superior experience (centered on its own services of course) on Nexus, with the hardware optimized for the OS. Matias Duarte, director of the Android UE at Google, said:
“The Samsung Galaxy S4 will have the Nexus experience, and it will have more timely updates.”
The latest IDC figures indicate that Android achieved 75% market share of smartphone shipments in the first quarter of 2013, up from just over 59% in the year-ago period, and with a 79.5% increase in sales. By contrast, iOS’s share fell from 23% to 17.3% with only a 6.6% rise in shipments, and Windows Phone moved into a clear third place for the first time, though with only 3.2% share, up from 2% a year before. Its increase in shipments was strong at 133% , though its 7m total is dwarfed by 162.1m for Android and 37.4m for Apple. BlackBerry saw its share fall from 6.4% in Q112 to 2.9%, though it wil hope the new BB10 release will start to reverse the trend in the current quarter. The also-rans were non-Android Linux flavors, at 1% share ‘ also a figure which could change with the upcoming release of handsets running Firefox Mobile and Ubuntu. The end-of-life Symbian clung on to just 0.6% share on 1.2m shipments, down from its third-ranked 6.8% position in the 2012 quarter.