Android is the dominant mobile operating system. It is installed on a large number of a variety of devices. And, according to the report, The Dot, the Android operating system is extremely fragmented.
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The problem of Android fragmentation is that a few years of mobile platform survived the output of several major revisions that led to the presence of a large proportion of devices that do not support the latest update. According to analysts, the most current version of Android 5.0 Lollipop installed now 12.4% of devices, while still the most popular version is Android 4.4 KitKat – 39,2%. In addition, outdated versions of Android 2.2 Froyo and Android 2.3 Gingerbread still accounts for about 6% of the employed devices.
For comparison, the most current version of iOS 8 was used at the end of may, 82% of Apple devices, the previous version of iOS 7 – 16% of the vehicles, and only 2% were in older versions.
Fragmentation is forcing developers to care about testing and optimizing your code to an earlier and outdated versions of Android, to solve compatibility issues. Suffer from this and users: “phones” are most at risk and most vulnerable to infection from malware.
Experts believe the situation for any “huge problem” and are confident that the vast majority of owners “phones” will never be able to install Android 5.1 or the latest Android M.
In The Daily Dot believe that this situation is largely the fault of the smartphone manufacturers that control the release of Android updates for their devices. Suffer eventually normal users can’t take full advantage of new OS versions, and also confronted with the fact that on older platforms do not start the application.
In the Apple ecosystem, the situation is much better. Apple at one time only sells three generations of the iPhone and the company controls both the hardware and software, the owners of “Apple” smartphones can count on the fact that the manufacturer will support their devices for four years. Thus developers have to test at the minimum number of gadgets and operating system versions.
