How Industry Software Expertise is Helping to Solve the Android Fragmentation Dilemma
It is no secret: While Google continues to push for wide adoption of smartphones driven by its open source Android
platform, most industry pundits know that manufacturers typically need
upwards of a full year of development and productization effort (and
often Google’s help)
to develop an Android phone. Not surprisingly, it takes much longer for
an OEM to reach a level where they can irrigate the operator ecosystem
with differentiated phones based on Android (this of course applies to
most new mobile device software stacks).
At the same time, we are all
aware that there are multiple parallel efforts to enhance Android that
have led many observers to believe that fragmentation is inevitable. Ultimately, it is said, this will become the bane
to developers who will struggle to reach an economy of scale on a
moving target where multiple variants of the Android OS co-exist.