Instagram for Android Reveals more Fragmentation Issues

Android users have been waiting on a port of Instagram, the photo editing and sharing social networking app, for some time. Today, it finally arrived, and not without the same issues that the Android version of Temple Run faced. Due to fragmentation, the app cannot do live previews of filters when taking photos. This works fine on iOS, but because the developers have so many platforms to develop for, some more demanding or less powerful than others, they couldn't add the feature. Not only that, apparently users are experiencing bugs. One issue is that the app will save three copies of the photo. Not only that, but it doesn't allow users to select where the photos will be stored. This is important on Android, because devices will often have very little on board storage, instead relying on user purchased sd cards.

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Android Fragmentation has never been Explained so Well

Don't believe that Android fragmentation is a real concern? Think again. Today, Temple Run was finally release on Android. Although, instead of being greeted with fanfare, they instead got a lot of users asking whether or not it would run on their device, or complaining that their device couldn't run the game. No wonder developers are fed up with Android!

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Just Another Reason Developers are Frustrated with Android

The above chart could require some explanation. What you have on the Y axis is the percentage of users who are using that version of their operating system. In general, adoption of a new operating system grows, then shrinks after the next OS is released. You can see a perfect (and nearly parabolic) example of that with iOS 4. It rose to nearly 100%, and then started dropping after the release of iOS 5, which has been growing even more rapidly than iOS 4. Their study only caught the drop of iOS 3, as it doesn't go that far back.

The other operating systems on there? Those don't look too clean, and there's a reason for that. Android devices don't see the same update process as iOS. On iOS, when it's updated, all iOS devices that can run the latest OS get it on release day. But for Android, users have to wait for their manufactures to create their own version of the OS. Worse yet, they're motivated to do just the opposite, forcing users to buy the next phone if they want an upgrade.

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Android Fragmentation Visualized

Above is just a taste of what Android fragmentation looks like. The chart shows a variety of Android phones, using color coded bars to show whether or not the phone is up to date, 1, 2, or 3 versions behind the current version. You can see that some phones started out one or two generations behind, and were 3 generations behind within a few months of their release. 

The full chart is below, which puts the iPhone on this chart.As you can see, Apple kept the iPhone updated with the latest version for 3 years after release, giving customers plenty of time to upgrade if they chose to. There's no fragmentation on the iOS side of things, as you can see below. 

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Android Losing Developers to iOS

New projects for Android, iOS, and the iPad between the first two quarters of this year

Expect app production rates to decrease in the near future, as developers jump ship to iOS. A report done by Flurry, which tracks developer support for multiple platforms, revealed that the number of developers working on Android apps dropped, while iOS app developers increased. How much? New Android projects have dropped from 36% down to 28% between the first and second quarter of this year. Meanwhile, iOS development has increased from 54% in the first quarter to 57% in the second quarter. Also, development of iPad specific apps has increased from 10% to 15%.

What caused this decrease in development? More below the break.

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