Android Market Still Suffering From Fragmentation

According to recent data put forward by the Android Developer Community, the problem of fragmentation in the Android OS is slowly declining but still a significant number of mobile phones are running on the older versions of the popular OS.

The data, which was compiled by the developer community by analysing the number of downloads made by Android devices accessing the Android Marketplace in two weeks ending April 12th, hinted that OS variations were on the decline and soon Android devices will be running on only two different versions of the OS.

Ever since Google came up with the Android mobile OS platform, it has released four versions of the OS, but due to the fact that it takes almost one year to develop a smartphone, new versions on the market come with old versions of the OS.

Fragmentation is bad for developers as in order to make their apps compatible with all the versions of the OS, they have to spend more resources. Consumers suffer because despite of buying the latest smartphones, they still end up with older version of the OS.

Meanwhile, smartphone manufacturers first need to update their phone's firmware before providing it with an OS update.