Many are predicting that the smartphone market is set to explode in 2011, some speculating that Android is poised to capture much of that growth.

Not a very risky prediction, really.

MG Siegler weighed in via a TechCrunch piece in which he repeats a couple of myths that somehow bear truth only through repeated assertion.

The "Apple is a Luxury Brand" Myth

And so the only way for the iPhone to “beat” Android would be for Apple to either open iOS up in the same way that Android is, or to create a huge variety of iPhones spread across the spectrum in terms of features and price. Neither of those things is going to happen.

My young daughter happens to enjoy Angry Birds, so recently I thought I'd grab her a little portable device to play it and her movies and music on. Being a casual mobile app developer, targeting Android for almost arbitrary reasons, I looked to see what Android devices were available so it could double as a convenient testing target.

There is nothing. The few devices I found were in the $400 range and generally featured underwhelming processors, terrible screens, and shoddy builds.

You simply can't find an Android PMP as economical as what Apple has achieved with the iPod Touch. A4 processor. Brilliant display. Great GPU. Facetime. Dual cameras. That thing is just a crazy value.

Sure, technically the iPod Touch isn't an iPhone, but for how most people use their smartphones (where the "phone" part of it is utterly irrelevant, and it's merely a mobile computing device), with the widening deployment of WiFi it is increasingly just as capable.

And make no mistake: The iPod Touch is a critical element of the iPhone's domination. We're talking platforms here, and while Google was busy actually undermining the non-smartphone devices (until recently Google treated tablets with incredible antipathy. Whatever the internal politics — perhaps the perceived birthright of ChromeOS — they were not supportive whatsoever, at one Google I/O acting both irritated and confused when an audience member asked about tablets. Nor are they supportive of PMPs where they pull market access and essentially cripple the device at birth), Apple was busy spreading iOS far and wide, creating a healthy ecosystem for developers to target.

Apple knows how to price down technology with the best of them, and they have demonstrated a strong ability and willingness to do so. The dated 3GS is still being manufactured and sold as new, just as the 3G hung around long after the 3GS became the starter.

The 3GS is incredibly dated by contemporary standards, and its slow processor, limited RAM, and old-school screen resolution place it firmly in the "low end" market. Apple still sells it. Read what Siegler had to say above and consider that.

When Apple feels pressure to segment the marketing of iOS more than they already do ("You can get an iPhone minus the 3G radio and fine-GPS for just $240 full retail, or you can get your subsidized 3GS if you're a chump and can't afford a couple hundred when signing up for a two thousand dollar contract commitment...."), they will. Any illusions that they won't, or moreso that they haven't already is just blind zealotry, lost in the weeds desperately trying to feel around for some comfort to assuage against Apple's marketshare competition.

I recently gained an interest in American football (after becoming aware that there was so much more to the game than just a bunch of guys smashing into each other, not to mention the "be prepared to explain man things" motive given that I have three young sons) and one of the things I have noticed in that live-can't-fast-forward world is that Apple advertises like crazy. From my limited sampling they are easily the overwhelmingly dominant pitchman on television, alternating between iPod Touch, iPad, and iPhone commercials. They are as mainstream as a corporation could get.

Stop your PVR fast forwarding for a while and pay attention to the commercials. Microsoft, Intel, Dell, even McDonalds...they are drown out by Apple's message.

The "Apple's Profitable Niche" Myth

They’re perfectly happy “at the top of the market” where they make a ton of revenue and profit. Billions more, in fact, than Google does with Android.

A recurring claim is that Apple will be pleased to retreat to their profitable little niche: That they're a purveyor of high markup, limited-run technology devices for the connoisseur, and they'll continue happily in their grey poupon ways, Android be damned.

Of course for much of Apple's history it was an incredibly unprofitable enterprise. Through the 90s, despite having their confident bevy of expensive devices and their single-digit saturation, Apple was an economic basket-case, posting billion dollar losses or cutting to the bone and barely breaking even. At one point in Steve Jobs' reign they were bailed out by Microsoft (an investment that would be worth untold riches for Microsoft today had they not quickly divested it).

The iMac started to turn that around by providing an inexpensive all-in-one computer that was novel and accessible for everyperson USA, going back to its middle class Apple II roots. My wife still berates me for not hopping on the AAPL train after correctly predicting what the iMac's impact would be.

After it, of course, the iPod stormed the market. It was a good device that was marketed right, and it laid the groundwork for the iPhone to make some major inroads on day 1. Again, the iPod sat at virtually every price point, easily winning the value race in most categories.

Cars and televisions and stereo receivers came with iPod connectors or docks. They didn't for any competing device.

Apple's profitability grew.

Apple's ability to squeeze a growing profit margin out of their business came by escaping from the niche. In the smartphone market there was a period where Apple was effectively closing on 100% of the market, which is exactly how developers and the media treated them (see the countless organizations that made an iPhone app and that was it -- they felt the consumer was served). Sure, the graphs would include Blackberries and Nokias, but come on -- Apple had the market to itself outside of things your work makes you carry and "What, you mean this thing is supposed to be a smartphone?" devices.

And like most businesses Apple is great at working the synergy. Many of their PC sales came about because they first got the user with an iPod or an iPhone. In the development world, a million developers ran out and bought an Apple equipment stack to try to write their own lottery ticket on the grand iPhone AppStore bet.

Apple has no plans on retreating to a niche. Nor was that niche ever profitable for them. Their strategy pounds home this point, with a focus that is engineering around significant if not dominant market positioning, with network lock-in that makes it difficult to challenge or break. Their application strategy, the top to bottom segmentation, and the "you're with us or you're against us" decisions like Facetime, there should be no confusion that Apple is targeting anything less than being the Microsoft of the decade.

The Red Lobster of Technology Companies

You can't get more mainstream than Apple. Apple is no more exclusive than the GAP or Target or eating at Red Lobster.

They make great devices, no doubt about it. I've been riding the Android train for 17 months now based upon the promise of many capable companies working together, but until the latest generation of devices, such as the Desire Z, I have never felt confident in recommending the devices to anyone else. Really I'm a little surprised it survived thorugh those birthing pains.

But it did. Android today is a very decent device and it's only getting better. Pundits like Scoble (whose fame still confuses me) lament that Android isn't deserving because the apps are better on the iPhone. Apps don't appear overnight, Scoble, and the surge in developer sentiment towards Android has been overwhelming over the past months. On my device I'm getting app update notices literally daily now, as development teams rush to fix up what previously was nothing but a second thought.

It's getting better everyday.

We came periolously close to a unipolar smartphone market, and despite the pains that I had to suffer with Android during its terrible toothing years, I'm glad that we now have a market that's open for any and all. Like Firefox did for Chrome, by making multiplatform support the default Android leaves an opening for Blackberry, Microsoft, Nokia, or anyone else to come along with something better, without being crowded out by an existing and impenetrable ecosystem surrounded by an unassailable network lock-in.

The "Apple Gave The Power Back to the Users, Android Gave It To The Carriers" Myth

The flip-side to this Android domination is what we’re already seeing. The carriers (again, in the U.S. in particular) are using Android’s openness to perform many of their same old tricks. I can’t help but think sometimes that it looks as if Google actually did the carriers a huge favor in the long-run because they’ve taken many of the bells and whistles that drove users to the iPhone in the first place and opened them up for the carriers to use as glittering lures to rope customers back into their traps.

This is the myth that I find simply extraordinary, the overwhelming evidence that it is utter nonsense being so obvious.

In the US Apple has been laying in bed with AT&T for years. Want to go to Verizon? Sorry, not an option. T-Mobile? Not an option. There is zero competition if you want an iPhone in the entire US of A.

Gave the power to the users, did it? First they came for your choice of carrier, with AT&T paying heavily into Apple's treasure for the priviledge.

Apple originally had a no app policy — as demanded of them by AT&T due to fears that apps would go crazy and take down the network — just as Facetime refuses to work over 3G, and various apps that threaten the AT&T / Apple relationship will get quietly squashed.

While Apple doesn't have NASCAR apps or similar bloatware that have very unfortunately appeared on a small minority of Android phones, every single choice on the device is made for you if you're set on an iPhone.

Compare that to Android: Pick your carrier among all available. Pick your device among literally dozens of top rank devices. Use standard consumer discretion to align interests with vendors.

Heard that Verizon stuck some bloatware and a Bing default on their phone? Okay, as a consumer you have countless alternative choices to choose instead while still using the apps you know, the data you've accumulated, and the platform that you've invested in, sending the message that it isn't viable. If Apple, on the other hand, decided that one half of your display will henceforth show nothing but ads (another ridiciulous myth is the proposition that the iPhone represents a purer transaction, which is utter tripe. Apple is locking you in as a consumer to their various media, application, and advertisement platforms), you have no options aside from simply abandoning the platform and whatever you have invested in it.

The iPhone only empowers users in a 1984-esque redefinition of the meaning of empowering. Any control it took from the carriers it placed firmly in the hands of Apple.

It has no notification LED.

It's a decent if unexceptional device. I can live without a real keyboard. I can live without a microSD slot (especially given the broken way that Android uses external storage). NFC is neat if extremely premature and consumer-only at this point.

The lack of a notification LED on Google's flagship device, however, is deadly.

The iPhonification of Android

I don't want to endlessly turn the screen on or suffer disruptive notification sounds (that I miss if I'm not nearby at that moment) just to know that an email dropped.

Hence why I like devices to have a notification LED. Preferrably one that is easily visible when it's in a case (beside the power connector would be perfect).

The Nexus One has such a notification behind the trackball. It's suboptimal given that it suffers from a very slow cycling rate by default (meaning you have to stop and look at the device for 10 seconds to see if it pulses), and the fact that it's hidden when the phone is in a case, yet it's far better than nothing.

Purportedly there are some fixes conceived to use several of the OLED pixels as a hacked out notification LED. Aside from the poor positioning and minimal visibility of the low brightness screen, my big concern there is OLED fade. Like plasma OLED has a finite lifespan, and the pixels that shine the brightest live the shortest, so you may end up with a notification burn in pattern on your screen.

On The Value of The Negative

My LED notification is just as valuable when it isn't blinking. It communicates with accuracy and reliability (meaning I'm assuming the battery hasn't run dry) that there is nothing demanding a response.

This "negative notification" concept eludes many, yet it's incredibly valuable.

Tracks in snow tell a lot, but snow without tracks tells just as much. A dog barking at an intruder tells you plenty. A dog quietly sleeping tells you as much.

On Monday I posted an entry titled Lies, Damn Lies, and surveys, the focus being that surveys — especially online surveys — are often of dubious merit, and worse are often intentionally or ignorantly misinterpreted by the press.

Yet it works wonders for both the press and the marketing research companies: There is a whole industry of lazy tech writers who will run with whatever is sent to them. Any slant they provide merely globs extra vaseline on the lens of accuracy.

In that case I was spurred by some just released results of an online survey done by GfK.

Take a look at the Fortune summary of said survey. As is the case with most other retellings, the Fortune writer seemed to simply rewrite the original Reuters story which itself said:

The survey found that just 25 percent of smartphone owners planned to stay loyal to the operating system running their phone, with loyalty highest among Apple users at 59 percent, and lowest for Microsoft's phone software, at 21 percent. Of users of Research in Motion's BlackBerrys, 35 percent said they would stay loyal.

The figure was 28 percent for users of phones running Google's Android software, and 24 percent for users of Nokia Symbian phones.

The Fortune story includes a big graph with the title "Plan to stick with your smartphone OS?". The iPhone towers at 59%, with Android down at a miserable 28%.

Wow, looks pretty rough for Android!

So I emailed GfK and they kindly responded with the same press release that they had sent out to the press. Unfortunately it still is only a summation, including no notes on methodology or the actual questions asked (which can often be very leading), yet it is far better than most survey companies that simply hide their summary behind a paywall, enjoying the attention as the press mangles it into something more hit magnetic.

Here's the table that was the source for most of these stories. I have to guess (based upon the surrounding wording) that it was the responses to a question asking current smartphone owners what they're going to consider when they next upgrade their phone.

There's Android at 28% among these single choice options. That's the meat of a lot of easy "news" stories.

Note the second line, though: "Will stay loyal to smartphone OS but switch handset make". Sum those two lines and for Android suddenly you're at 44%. Sure, maybe someone with an HTC Evo 4G is looking longingly at a Samsung Galaxy S, or maybe they're imagining getting that Android-powered Playstation phone when it comes out, but we (meaning virtually every single press reference to this survey) are talking about the OS here.

So Reuters (and any that followed Reuter's lead) couldn't manage to achieve a grade-school reading ability. I'm serious: my daughter had table reading assignments in grade 1 that were just like this, a job that many in the tech press would fail.

Extraordinary.

But it gets even better. Among those who answered "I will look at all options" (which ideally should be 100% of respondants), here are what each current platform's users are considering as their considerations when they upgrade at some point in the future (multiple choices obviously being allowed).

It paints a rather different narrative than the common, egregiously wrong interpretation. You end up with hilarious ignorance like this garbage. With what you have learned here, check out the chart here and see if you can figure out what's wrong.

The iPhone still takes the lead (with loyalty oddly dramatically higher in Germany — the home country of the survey organization — than in any other nation), but look back at the original Reuters statement: "The survey found that just 25 percent of smartphone owners planned to stay loyal to the operating system running their phone...the figure was 28 percent for users of phones running Google's Android software".

I suppose that sounds better than the more accurate "44% of Android users have pledged undying allegience to the operating system, regardless of the endless and unpredictable changes among competing choices. Of the remainder, the vast majority still plan on hopping back on the Android train regardless.

Survey Results are Meaningless minus the Methodology

If you're in the survey (or "Marketing Intelligence") business, an easy way to gain lots of free publicity is to publish some results that feed into an ongoing skirmish: For little cost a press release will percolate across the web, bubbling up everywhere, spreading your brand. In all likelihood a newswire writer will have the same motivation, and carefully pick and choose factlets with the goal of making a story more inflammatory.

Given that smartphones are big business now, and the battle (RIM, Nokia, Apple and Google's hordes) is a very public one, smartphones and their operating systems are often the focus.

We've seen this play out quite a few times already: Some survey results come out, usually with a very pro-Apple slant (the Apple enthusiast ecosystem is far more receptive to such material, and is more likely to run with it), and is quoted everywhere.

As always, methodology and details actually come second. It's then that critical, mind-blowing flaws in the survey or its presentation/interpretation are revealed. Of course by then the message was already delivered and has become truth through repeated assertion.

So for all you market research startups out there, I encourage you to post a self-selective survey on the website of an already biased group where they can profess themselves as wealthy, virile, mega-sexed super-humans. Release these extraordinary findings via press release and watch as lazy bloggers and tech columnists run with it.

Remember this ridiculous survey? It was the harbinger of doom for Android. Only it wasn't. It is only one of a long line of terrible surveys, and only one example where the tech press and wire writers misrepresented the already poor survey, or at a minimum didn't bother asking the questions that matter.

So we'll wait for GfK's methodology (never expect tech journalists to care to look this up. As an industry it is rife with incredible ignorance and laziness), and the inevitable correction will be a whimper to the roar of the original release. At a glance it is obvious that all is not as it appears, and it isn't simply that the numbers don't confirm my bias: They just don't add up, and have little correlation with other surveys on the same topic.

RIM Isn't Dead

Many years back I applied to RIM. They never contacted me. Clearly that's the source of all of their travails today.

Really, though, I await great things from RIM: The company had some golden handcuffs to their existing platform — the lucrative enterprise messenger system undermined more innovative initiatives in the same way that Windows and Office hobbles Microsoft — but now that they're seeing some serious attacks that can't be ignored, the battle is underway again. The PlayBook looks like it may be a winner, and I'm willing to sandpaper my fingers to use that 7" tablet if it delivers what it promises. QNX is simply a glorious operating system (it is elegant and close to perfect), so that alone has me interested.

A Brief History of My Antagonism Towards Flash

I was anti-Flash before Steve Jobs made it cool. I have as much anti-Flash credibility as anyone.

For over a decade I've steered organization after organization away from building solutions in Flash, often against great resistance. I was evangelizing SVG — what I saw as the biggest opportunity for a more illuminated, open solution than Flash — back when its strongest corporate sponsor was none other than Adobe.

Aside: Humorously Adobe was leveraging SVG in their battle against Macromedia's Flash/Shockwave empire, before finally giving in and buying 'em out.

I have railed loudly against Flash on many occasions.

The Great Flash of Propriety

Yet Flash is fairly pervasive, despite my valiant attempts.

Up until around 2005 and the birth of YouTube, Flash had very little presence in the video space: That realm was dominated by Real Player, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, among others. Flash fit in the RIA niche where it displaced the short-lived empire of ActiveX and Java Applets. It was the tool for great web entertainment like You Don't Know Jack, the Net Show.

Then YouTube rose with Flash at its presentation core, and the rest is history. Soon Flash was the oddball foundation for video.

If you mention Flash today, however, the topic will immediately veer violently to the great Flash/Apple battle of 2010, where Apple has loudly rejected Flash (where it represents a proxy for "rich applications they don't control"), and Google, perhaps being a bit antagonistic, has embraced it with their Android and Chrome solutions.

Ok, embraced is probably a bit of an overstatement. In reality Google's initiatives have top notch HTML5 support, the best JavaScript performance, and are probably the best mobile/thin platforms for rich HTML5 applications, but they just happen to optionally support Flash as well, perhaps providing a bridge from the past.

A Very Personal Flash Experience

I've been running Flash on my Nexus One for several months now. I have it configured to On Demand so the scourge of animated, CPU-clogging Flash adverts don't destroy my web browsing experience. When there is Flash content that I want to view, I click the little arrow and voila, Flash is running on my mobile phone.

Overall it has been a very welcome addition to the device. From restaurant sites, to small videos like Zero Punctuation reviews, to games for my children, to product information pages, I like having the option of engaging Flash when the need arises.

So when I saw entry titled "Just How Bad Is Flash on Android" on Daring Fireball, of course I was drawn in. There Gruber indirectly linked to some demonstrations of Flash failing miserably on several Flash video sites.

To which, I say, no kidding.

Anyone under any illusion that having Flash on their mobile device opened up any and all content is willfully or technically incompetent. That or it's link bait trying to herd in the people who desperately need their biases confirmed, and a lot of people desperately need to believe that Flash isn't necessary on mobiles. I'd probably say it's that second option at play.

Of course not all content will play. This is, after all, a mobile device with a little power-sipping mobile processor. While 1Ghz sounds pretty pimp, the Snapdragon in the Nexus One is in many ways a weakling, particularly in video decoding and 3D graphics tasks where it fell behind even the iPhone 3GS.

On this 1Ghz processor I've had trouble playing local 720x480 h264 videos encoded at 1Mbps, encountering frequent stuttering and dropped frames. Compare that to the iPhone 4 which allows for up to 7Mbps+ videos at 1280x720, which it plays flawlessly, owing to the excellent hardware decoding.

When it comes to video the iPhone 4 simply kicks the Nexus One (and virtually every other HTC Android device, as HTC is addicted to Snapdragons) to the curb. Then again, the Samsung Galaxy S kicks the iPhone 4 around and calls it Sally, while the OMAP in the Droid 2/X offers a fair fight.

Snapdragon processor devices are not the top of the pile by a long measure.

So the Nexus One really isn't a great platform to highlight video prowess anyways.

Enough with the hardware excuses.

Add that Flash is often its own worst enemy: When you enable the plug-in, your enable in the Android browser is browser wide for that page, meaning it simultaneously enables the twelve punch-the-monkey animated ads surrounding it, often destroying the experience.

So there is no surprise at all that a high bitrate 1000x500 video surrounded by Flash adverts — a scenario that clogs a high performance 2.4Ghz core on a modern x86 PC (which would be equal to about a 8Ghz or higher snapdragon) — probably with a layer of DRM adding more demands, doesn't run so great on a mobile device.

"So Steve Jobs Was Right! Flash won't work on mobile!"

Given that I've enjoyed Flash on my smartphone on many occasions, I find such claims — which I keep seeing made by seemingly non-stupid individuals — ludicrous. It is fervent, desperate doublespeak.

Mobile Flash exists. It's far from perfect. The available content usually isn't even aware that it exists. Yet still, it is.

And really, it isn't a fair fight anyways. When sites provide HTML5 video, they do so often specifically for the iPhone/iPad because of the massive namespace territory they conquered. Most sites don't even feature sniff for the functionality — they don't care if you are running Chrome or Safari or IE 9 and can run HTML Video — but will instead refuse to serve up HTML 5 video for anything but those Apple devices. Given that, they encode specifically and only for that platform, with appropriate bitrates and complexity profiles ideal for those devices.

There's no big surprise that it often runs well.

That isn't a very encompassing, scalable solution though. One device family isn't meant to rule, and at some future point HTML5 will start to leave the iOS devices behind. The iPhone lived through a special moment in time where it was handled as a blessed child, getting its own special treatment, however that moment is passing.

Of course the Flash people have a solution for disparate devices, using dynamic streaming that is based upon the consuming device (resolution and bitrate scaling based upon the capabilities of the device, very similar to some technology in Microsoft Silverlight). Not surprisingly there is little use of it yet given that mobile Flash devices just started appearing very recently, and still comprise a tiny market.

"So...Steve Jobs Was Right?"

No.

When I originally thought about how to respond to this, my first idea was to make a video demonstrating a smartphone failing miserably at rendering and interacting with various HTML5 sites. But then I thought better because someone might confuse that as a serious criticism of HTML5 when I love the technology stack and pragmatically realize that it can't (and shouldn't) always be universally accessible.

Yet still, contemplate the failings of HTML5 on mobile devices:

• Layout can be ill suited for the screen dimensions and resolution of a smartphone.
• Functionality can be overwrought and too heavy for a smartphone.
• Input techniques might not work on smartphone.
• etc.

Anyone who has browsed on their smartphone or tablet has experienced all of those. If someone were looking to go out of their way to act shocked that such an experience exists, source material can be found everywhere.

Which is of course why many sites, like the atrocious script pig TechCrunch (seriously, load it up in Firefox with Firebug and check the net tab), created special mobile pages that they force you to, against your will, when you try to visit on a mobile device.

The next time you see a TOP 10 CANVAS DEMOS on your social news site of choice, pull them up on your tablet or smartphone and check out how well they work. Chances are overwhelmingly that they will fail miserably. Almost every HTML5 game demands that you use a keyboard to control it, if they aren't simply too resource demanding for a little mobile device.

So do we write off web browsers on mobile devices? Do we say, in a tut-tut-tut fashion, "No mobile browser exists. WAP is the world for portable devices!" I hope not.

Punching Monkeys Coming in HTML5 Soon To You

One trend that is accelerating is the movement of many ads to HTML5 and away from Flash. That short period where iOS devices came with an almost intrinsic AdBlock+ in the form of the lack of Flash capabilities is rapidly disappearing. Soon every page you visit is going to be a mishmash of computationally demanding canvas renders and DOM manipulations, and it's going to become much more difficult to avoid their cost.

Closing Notes

For those who are on the fence about the whole Flash thing — whether they care about it on their mobile or tablet — take a look a the quick video I put up above. The videos did not run perfectly, the auto configurator didn't provide a seamless, perfect experience...yet if the option is that or nothing, I think most reasonable people would agree that it's better than nothing.

While a number of beta releases of Android 2.2 (AKA Froyo) have made the rounds since the Google I/O public unveiling over a month ago, all of the prior releases targeted the T-Mobile variants, leaving my EPE54b-based "AT&T" model on the outside longingly looking in.

Sure, there are methods of rooting and rolling back and then forward to get it working, but I wasn't interested in them simply because this phone is too useful for me to bother: It is already a very decent phone, and I was willing to bide my time until Google refined the final bits and pushed it officially, at least when the alternative started with rooting.

Alas, a version has finally been unviled for my version of Android. I downloaded it, did the manual update, and initial impressions are incredibly positive.

I've complained numerous times before about the stuttering, seemingly overwhelmed feel of the platform, at least relative to the buttery smoothness of an iPhone, and I can happily say that most of those complaints are no longer true.

One possible facet of the Froyo update that has been debated back and forth as myth has been support for 802.11n. I can gladly say that FRF85b does indeed enable 802.11n on my handset.

Taken after switching the WAP to 802.11n only, though it establishes the same connection in mixed g/n. Yes, I named my WAP "dlink", even though it isn't a dlink.

While much has been made about 802.11n's higher theoretical speed, how often is greater than 54Mbps really needed on a smartphone? Is the max 54Mbps of 802.11g just too constrained?

Hardly. The increased max theoretical throughput is a non-issue for this usage.

Instead the real benefit of 802.11n is that it maintains a decent throughput at the edges of the connection, where 802.11g would stutter and disconnect. I can already say that testing this throughout the house and the yard has demonstrated a more consistent, more usable experience. With the WAP in the basement, connectivity in the bedroom was often more hit and miss, whereas now it appears to be rock solid and ever so speedy.

“Fragmentation? What Fragmentation?”

The Android Developer’s Blog ignited a firestorm recently by publishing an entry on the purported fragmentation of the Android ecosystem.

It’s worth a read. Too bad the same can’t be said to most of the responses to it.

When the topic concerns either Android or the iPhone, and the arguable failings of each platform, it’s seldom debated by people genuinely interested in seeing the target of their criticisms improve in any meaningful way. Instead it’s pundits (less generously called fanboys) hoisting their flag, pushing in for their chance to line drive some talking points.

Rabble rabble rabble, Steve Jobs will eat your firstborn

Rabble rabble rabble, Android is fragmented and anarchist.

It is noise that seldom inspires or enlightens.

On Android Fragmentation

We have a problem, Mountain View.

Some handset vendors are lagging on upgrading their devices, if they do at all. There is a wide disparity in performance and functionality among devices, leading to unpredictable user experiences.

It parallels the dark days of Windows Mobile, when unloved devices were shat onto the market and promptly forgotten, the vendors more interested in prepping you for the next iteration that, they assure you, will fix all of the problems of the last.

For those writing application targeting Android, such as myself, there is a need to carefully consider the current version breakdown, choosing the target that offers the minimum functionality you need without restricting your market too much. You need to perform the same analysis on the target hardware capabilities, as the simple reality is that a rich graphical 3D application won’t run acceptably on a wide range of deployed Android devices. A high-end game might run well on a Samsung Galaxy S, for instance, while being unusable on every other Android device.

Do you target 2.1 and take advantage of Quick Contacts, for instance, and limit yourself to 45% of the potential customer base, maybe preparing yourself for the future? Or do you target 1.6 and simply go without those refinements? Do you build a 3D rendering interface that will choke on all but the latest handset, or do you cater to the lower common denominator?

It’s a serious concern. There are brand new Android devices that are hitting shelves today with Android 1.5 on them. There are new devices with mediocre processors, limited memory, and barely functional GPUs.

Isn’t that weird? It isn’t optimal.

Add that there are all of the various skins that the vendors put on their devices to differentiate: HTC’s SenseUI, Motorola’s MotoBlur, Sony’s Rachael, among others.

Android devices come in all sizes and capabilities: There are big screens and little screens; devices with keyboards and those without; cutting-edge super phones and feature phones on steroids; tablets and netbooks; processors with NEON instruction sets and without; with SSE or without.

An Android device is not a homogenous experience for either users or developers.

Crazy isn’t it? Anarchy reigns! Contrast this to the land of iPhone where there is a very strong uniformity and development consistency among experiences and development and devices.

Shouldn’t Android be more like the iPhone? Shouldn’t Google lay the hammer down and demand that vendors refrain from customizing, they upgrade in lockstep, they build a consistent, uniform platform, and nothing deviates from the reference implementation? Everyone building a Nexus One with a vendor label on it?

No way.

Fragmentation is the Reason the Android Platform Has Succeeded

The progress of Android over the past year, or even just the past 6 months, has been nothing short of extraordinary.

From being a marginal wannabe, largely adopted by those ideological few willing to turn a blind eye to its many, many faults, Android is now a very serious competitor among mainstream consumers.

It’s an accomplishment that Google could never have pulled off alone. They needed a lot of help from a lot of very capable partners, and their strategy with the Android platform and the Open Handset Alliance is entirely the reason we got to where we are today.

HTC, Motorola, LG, Samsung, Sony, nVidia, Intel, ARM, among a slew of others…a lot of very smart, very capable companies working to make their own success story, pulling up the Android platform at the same time.

Motorola wants to sell you a Droid, yet by investing so much into making their devices a success they’ve build an ecosystem where you benefit from their success even if you choose another vendor’s phone.

Fragmentation is progress.

Instead of releasing a single iteration yearly, a single lockstep uniform device and experience, a Darwinist battle is taking place, the best choices and experiences triumphing. The Evo 4G is hitting shelves today, yet already we’re hearing about the next superstar, a purported HTC Scorpion device with a 1.5Ghz processor coming soon.

When people argue that Android should be more like the iPhone, they lose sight of this very beneficial side effect of the so-called fragmentation.

If Google ran the Android platform like Apple, it would have been a Buzzesque flop. It would have failed miserably.

But they didn’t, and it wasn’t. We are where we are.

So where are we?

Well firstly, most of what you’ve read about Android fragmentation is bunk. Horror stories about incompatible apps and terrifying development processes are largely exaggerated.

But there are some issues.

Google Earth, Google Goggles and the official Android Twitter application (an excellent application that was built with Google’s help) all require Android 2.1 or above. It’s fairly obvious that Google intentionally limits the best to a recent version in efforts to motivate vendors to hasten their upgrades, and to showcase the most recent platform additions, such as the animated backgrounds in the Twitter applications.

Those are the reason that customers demand that vendors update their phone, and it helps keep them motivated to push out upgrades. Motorola just released the Backflip on 1.5, and Sony released the X10 on 1.6. Both of them have gotten a lot of criticisms in reviews for this choice, and they both will pay for lagging behind. Their motivation to get upgrades to the market quickly is very strong.

As a developer, when you develop an application you need to target a given version knowing that you’re cutting out anyone running something older (thus cutting out some prospective customers). In a subset of cases you can target an old version and optionally target newer features using runtime reflection and feature sniffing.

And there are compatibility quirks. In developing an app that integrates the camera I’ve encountered a number of issues, including devices that invert the preview output, some that only return greatly scaled down pictures when a picture is taken, among a variety of other little variations and surprises, and that’s just among the devices I’ve tested with.

There are known issues when dealing with OpenGL where some devices demand a certain magic quadrant of environment conditions to operate at their peak.

All in all, though, it is an absolute walk in the park compared to most other development efforts I have pursued. The Android SDK abstracts most everything to a shockingly effective degree, and the very clever, HTML-like (and thus XAML-like) layout manager allows you to very effectively run your application on a huge variety of displays.

You can build high-performance code in the NDK, including hand-crafted ARM assembly, but you can do it in a way that will only optionally be used if the right conditions are available (e.g. an ARM processor with NEON instructions), otherwise falling backed to a managed version.

In many ways writing to Android is a bit like writing an HTML5 application. There are quirks that you have to deal with on some clients, but they’re mostly known and documented and fade away as the clients move closer to the specification, without restricting the innovation and uniqueness of the individual clients.

Everything about Android is built to abstract from the device, from the virtual machine runtime to the density-independent pixels to the layout manager’s multi-dot-pitch resource utilization (I would have preferred that they used vector graphics, such as SVG, but it’s better than nothing).

If Android is HTML5, then the iPhone is ActiveX

When you develop for the iPhone, you develop for the iPhone. With the iPad there’s one additional form factor, but the universe of clients is extremely limited and of little variance. With the new iPhone there are rumors that it will see a simple doubling of each axis’ pixel count, allowing the system to simply pixel double previous applications.

It’s a bit like developing for Internet Explorer back in the early 90s: Everything was grand and entirely consistent and uniform, and in many cases you could just target an ActiveX control because you could make so many assumptions about your target.

There is limited variability build into the iPhone SDK or development process, and those hurdles are crossed when they are encountered. When the iPad came out, they updated the SDK to deal with the second screen size. The new iPhone SDK added the ability to deal with the new pixel density.

It makes a developer’s life simple. But it also seriously hobbles the rate of innovation and the ability to adapt to change.

It’s a Long Term Strategy

In the short run the single-target approach – the ActiveX approach – wins. In the longer run those early gains disappear, especially when you’re moving uniformly (“non-fragmented”) against many speedy opponents.

Just take a gander at the comments on any Android market share story. Just a few months ago it was gloating damnation as the iPhone ecosystem dominated the Android platform. Now it has subtly shifted, and the argument has moved from "iPhone dominates!" to “You can’t compare the many Android makers against just Apple! Apple still beats HTC!” It’s quite a shocking adaptation, and of dubious merit: As a developer I completely care about the platform saturation, not whether a phone is a Motorola or an LG.

And of course Apple does as well. There are millions of iTouch and iPad devices that don’t get counted in smartphone surveys, and they give iPhone targeting developers a staggering lead still, but we’ll see for how long.