On Jan 18, 10:35 am, Dianne Hackborn <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 7:22 AM, JP <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hmm, I've toyed with that a while back, and as far as I remember, the > > app won't even launch, and crash with a class-not-found exception > > (makes somewhat sense). > > > http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/backward-compatibility... > This means having to cut off users on older Android releases, no? Kevin illustrates the problem nicely. It's unfortunate that some of the carriers and manufacturers haven't caught on to the idea of bringing their products along for the ride, at least not yet, which I believe is one core issue of the barrage of complaints.
> Finally, as far as dealing with multiple versions of the platform -- how > different is this, really, than Windows and MacOS where there are three or > more different major versions of those platforms in active use? (And on > MacOS, for quite a while now different CPU architectures!) You just do on > Android exactly the same thing you do on those platforms: look at the > distribution of versions to decide the minimum one you want to target, and > do the appropriate thing for using newer APIs when you want to do that. > It is different in that XP through Windows 7 have been released over the course of, what, eight years now? Users are much more educated and experienced in what to expect. At work, I, like many users (hopefully), "just" pick up the phone or send an email, and the problem will be taken care of. On a mobile device however... it just kindof ought to work, which isn't an unreasonable expectation. Being facetious with the backwards logic, the level of support that Google set aside to support the release of the N1 seems to confirm that idea. As far as OS X goes, during a couple of years of transition, Apple supported "fat" binaries just like they did when they switched OpenSTEP from Motorola to Intel a decade earlier. There's experience with that, and in the mobile environment, this is all new stuff and needs to be managed accordingly, IMHO. I want to add, no question of course, it would be unjust to criticize anybody that an expectation wasn't set that Android would be subjected to a degree of fragmentation when Android was first released "wayback". Yet, here we are, and it would be disappointing to see the issue glossed over. > > But let's look at the current situation: the oldest version of the platform > that developers need to worry about is 1.5, which was finished less than a > year ago. It appears to me that most of the manufacturers that have such > devices on the market have pledged to update them to 2.x. If things proceed > how it sounds, I think the bulk of the devices will be running a platform > version released in the last year. So that gives you an upper bound of > maybe 4 platform versions to support. (And keep in mind -- doing 4 > significant platform releases in a year is pretty extreme, and maybe not > something that will continue. If you think it is hard on you, imagine the > poor platform developers. :p) Let's hope for the best then.
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