Android Fragmentation Graphically Depicted; ...and it is Gory

[dgstorm]

Here's a news piece that we didn't quite get to yesterday with all the bigger news that happened. It's a good thing that Google may be planning to refocus the Android ecosystem and gain better control of it, as we reported just yesterday. Because, these two graphical representations clearly indicate how bad of a problem the Android fragmentation problem has become. In the past, Google wanted us to believe that there was no problem and that the setup simply resulted in greater diversity. However, as you can see in the pics, that diversity may be going a bit too far, as there are literally thousands of different Android devices out there, and at some point Google may need to reign that in. Regardless, whether you want to call it fragmentation or variety, the study that was the source of these pics brought out some interesting facts.

Here is a breakdown of some of them: ("The study uses stats from customers who have downloaded the OpenSignalMaps application.")

• There are 3997 devices running on Android
• Samsung products are the most popular, followed by HTC
• The Galaxy S II is the most popular Samsung device ("The Galaxy SII (GT-i1900) had 61,389 of its users downloading the application in the last half a year.")
• Samsung grabbed 40% of the market (which seems to match up with other similar studies and marketing data.
• "Interestingly, the study showed a higher percentage of ICS devices than the official Google data. ICS was adopted by nearly 8% of users as of April 2012."

It's fascinating to see all these strange devices that mot of us have never heard of, like the Concorde Tab (a hungarian 10.1 inch device). This really shows just how many small companies world-wide have been jumping on the Android bandwagon. What do you think of these stats?

Source: OpenSignalMaps

[Droid-Xer]

That does look bad. That's what happens when you open source something though. How many distros of Linux do we see. Quite a few as well. I think Google should just make their own devices and close source to others.

[RobKort]

Is the nature of the beast, I highly doubt that we get away from it unless Google makes a mayor shift.

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