Is Android doomed?

[ministersin]

I am a G1 user from Day One. I am rooted and have flashed ROMs from every developer since JF.

I love my phone and I love Android.

BUT I was thinking today as I went through the market...

It seems every app is updating to be compatible with 1.5, then 1.6, and HERO, ad CLIQ and now DROID.

With dozens of devices coming out in the coming months and probably 100 by this time next year...will Android's best feature (open source) eat it alive?

I mean one of the major properties of a smartphone are apps. Will developers really develop if they have the headache of debugging every month for some new device?

Will people want a market where 20% or more of the apps don't even work with their phone?

Discuss.

[cmbarry1]

well as far as i know 1.6 allows dev's to make apps work for diff screen sizes and resolutions , there are always going to be bugs to fix anyways so I don't think anything will happen

[ministersin]

well as far as i know 1.6 allows dev's to make apps work for diff screen sizes and resolutions , there are always going to be bugs to fix anyways so I don't think anything will happen

I think the differences extend beyond just screen size and resolution don't they?
I mean remember re-installing everything after cupcake. Then some after donut. And some that I love still don't work with donut (Phonebook for one. one of the best apps in the market that is now useless to me).

And now Eclair. And some devices have proprietary OS, like MotoBlur. It's not even 1.5, so anything that is not backwards compatible for cupcake doesn't work. Which means some 1.6 and and now 2.0 apps.

I know there are always busg, but what happens when you get a bug on hero, but not on Droid? And then you fix the Hero issue and it breaks Droid?

And then the Market gets flooded with 7 different versions of the same app. I mean search cupcake and see how many apps show up with special versions.

I mean it sounds like the perfect mac commercial to me:

DROID asks MAC "What's that?"
MAC says "Oh it's a weather app."
DROID says "We have that app."
DROID installs it and it Force Closes when he shows it to MAC
DROID says "Oh, sorry. Not that one. That's the cupcake one. Hold on one second. I'll install the right one."
Now MAC pulls out an umbrella while DROID is still looking for the right app in the rain.

[cmbarry1]

lol wow nice commercial add that is good haha, i guess you are right but I don't think that we will suffer to bad it will get fixed

[Derrick]

Its a valid concern, but I don't think it is much of an issue. No matter what kind of smartphone you have everytime there is a major update to the SDK, developers will have to upgrade their apps as well. Its up to each phone's respective carrier to send the updates to their customers.

As for Hero/Blur type modifications that manufacturers build should only have an effect on a select few apps. I remember when the hacked Hero ROMS were first launched out of the 30 apps I had, only Open Home and BetterCut were unable to launch or launched incorrectly (force close).

[PeteS]

This is a sort of complex question, but Android is certainly not doomed. What you're seeing with the 1.0 to 1.1 to 1.5 to 1.6 to 2.0 updates is an API that is getting some pretty substantial upgrades, at the cost of functionality that has either been improved or completely revamped.

Take, for example, the dynamic screen size update. Yes, this may be a pain for some developers, but everyone knew that something like this was bound to happen eventually since not every phone was going to have 480x320 for the rest of time.

Or look at OpenGL on Android. The API specs for implementing OpenGL were completely jumbled around for the update to 1.5, but it was done so to clean up an API that previously, well, sucked. And now it sucks a lot less.

So you're looking at an extremely young API that is experiencing some temporarily severe growing pains, but that will become much less drastic over time. I'm of the opinion that the API will sooner or later stabilize and become much more backwards-compatible than it currently is.

It's just, so many of the changes have been vital to the very notion of how these apps are supposed to display themselves on the screen, there's really been no choice.

But back to your question about whether Android is doomed or not, well, Android is now capable of running on screens of various resolutions, netbooks, tablets, etc. Other systems are not so versatile (iPhone) because of their strict hardware platform approach. It only seems like a problem because Android is releasing updates fairly quickly (what other systems releases multiple major upgrades per year?), but would you rather have exponentially cooler features at the cost of developers having to make a few (usually minor) modifications to their apps, or a non-incremental approach where Android 3.0 is so different from Android 2.0 that it's like the difference between Windows XP and Windows 3.1?

As a developer, I'd much rather small changes to keep up to date than to have to completely rewrite my app. As a consumer I'm also much happier knowing that things I want to be improved on my phone may actually be improved within my phone's lifetime.

[Mukan]

Its up to each phone's respective carrier to send the updates to their customers.

Except, not all phones are going to always be on the latest versions. Droid is the only 2.0 phone so far, and there's been a lot of talk as to whether g1/mytouch are even going to get 2.0. Every time the SDK gets updated, it fragments the development farther because right now, there are 1.5, 1.6, and 2.0 phones on the market (and 1.0? not sure). What happens when we're on version 5.0, and those still hanging on to their G1s are still rocking 1.6? Then we've got to develop support for 1.6 all the way through 5.0.

As a customer and potential developer, it is a major concern that is growing larger by the day. It needs to be addressed somehow.

Edit: PeteS posted while I was writing and brings up some good points. Although, it's still going to be a problem as phones are slowly left in the dust of latest releases.

[Ward]

I wish I could respond and just say "No." I'll give you an easy example as to why not:

They all generally run on the same platform (think x86 for Windows). Now in Windows computing you have applications that cannot work backwards (i.e. Windows 7 app in Windows 98) however; a good deal of outdated apps can run in the newer windows env's because of compatibility modes put in place. With that said I'm pretty confident the SDK's will include this as an option, as well as being native in the OS given the quickness of this mobile OS' adoption.

So, in other words: No, Android is not doomed, in fact this is good that a lot of devices are coming out. There will probably be a standard of a couple versions forward and back for all Android based phones.

[ChAnDu]

There are many ways to improve the market than considering it to be doomed..
they can like put some tags for all the applications stating which mobiles they are compatible with and even the version if possible.....then simply filter(possibly lots of them to even get the suitable app if u're running an older version of the OS) to get the appropriate results for ur mobile.....this way we can even take away the possibility for ur ad(which was funny btw :D)

and as for the developers.........am sure it wont be such a hard task for them to keep track of these things.....might be irritating...but shldn't be a big deal...

[kizer]

There are a lot of phone carriers and builders seriously seeing the way things are going to pan out. We all know that the iPhone is a force to be dealt with and that Microsoft is @#%! them selves because they know android is here to stay without a single dime towards their licensing.

Personally its not android that's doomed. The market is doomed. ;)
They need to have something in place unless they do and I'm speaking out of turn. Each app submitted needs to have a check for version and make/model of phone.

If you are running 1.6 G1 do you really need to see any chatter about the Droid or Samsung or the cliq? I think not simply becasue your phone is not compatable. I don't think it should be up to the devs to keep the market working I think it should be up to google to police the market. Sure it worked great in the past, but honestly Its going to get really bad unless they figure something out or more or less say "Oh, well who cares its the Devs problems and if the customer doesn't like it then don't download it"

I don't know how many times over the last few weeks I've had to update an app to fix a Droid bug. What do I care about a Droid phone when I don't even own one, but you know I have the latest .apk installed to support it. :D

I can't wait for the flood of laptops and whatever else comes in.

[chris76]

I do not suggest to update the version withouth checking it will not damage the installed applications.