That doesn't really address the problem that people are really
complaining about when they say "fragmentation."
The Android OS itself has several major versions you need to target, but
that's also true of iOS, and (to my knowledge) people DON'T complain
about fragmentation on iOS.
The problem is, as I interpret it:
1. Lots of various screen resolutions.
2. Different UI hardware on each device (keyboard? soft buttons? what
order are the buttons in?)
3. Different graphics hardware on each device.
4. Different CPU/math support on each device.
5. Bugs in some devices in the way that they present their capabilities
and/or in their implementation of various standard Android APIs. I'm
looking at you, Samsung, and your buggy SoundPool implementation.
The different OS kernels don't figure in my top five issues to worry
about, except as they could potentially affect #5 (as in, adding their
own bugs to the mix). So having a hypervisor that allowed you to run
multiple OS versions at once on a phone doesn't really help at all.
Having a device with lots of pixels that you could boot up into various
different resolutions would help with #1. Also giving it lots of
hardware options and allowing you to disable them would help with #2
(maybe just a detachable keyboard like the ASUS Transformer). #3 and #4
really require different devices to test on, though probably only 4-5
devices to hit the major contenders. #5 probably requires that you own
each of the buggy devices so you can test on them.
Tim
On 3/20/2012 10:39 PM, Evan Pyle wrote:
Not sure if this is the right spot for this, but I was hoping someone
could answer my question.
With the current Android fragmentation between different hardware and
handsets, why not have the whole operating system run run a hyper-
visor on the phone. ROM's would be portable between phones, dev
testing could be done on anything.
I am expecting there would be a performance hit, but with current
generation hardware it shouldn't be to much of an issue.
Cheers,
Evan
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