Recent Android Market share shows Decline of Fragmentation

It has been sixteen months since the first Android Phone entered the market. Since, then Google has released four major versions of the Operating System. These frequent major updates are the cause of Android's fragmentation issue, with hardly any new smartphone running on the latest Android. But according to the recent data from Android's Developer community it seems that the situation is improving.

The rate at which Google was bringing out major update of Android one after the other, led to a situation where more than 50% of the smartphones were running on Android 1.6 - aka Donut, this was three months ago when Android 2.1 was just out. This fragmentation in the market is a nightmare for application developers and mobile vendors. Inspite of the great features and capacity of the latest Android, an Application developer can't write applications for it because of its lower share in the market or sometimes because mobile vendors are releasing smartphones which don't have the required firmware to support all the functionalities and features of the version they are running.

One of the major trouble that smartphone manufacturers face is the update - the new versions require better firmware. Consider the first smartphone to use Android, the T-Mobile G1, it won't run versions > 1.6 due to lack of internal memory. Similar technical issues are common among a lot of manufacturers.

A while back there were some rumours about Google addressing this issue. They might be slowing down the updates and shifting their focus from Android Core to Applications. This actually makes some sense, with Android 2.1 being a powerful release to compete with their major rival iPhone OS, Android developers can now concentrate more on Application development part than the core.

The recent stats from the Android Developer community, show some progress in the version distribution since the release of Android 2.1 - Eclair, the version included with Google Nexus one and Motorola's Droid.

Although Fragmentation is supposed to hinder the growth of Android, the number of smartphones running on Android has almost doubled from the period of November 09 to February 10. Google will no doubt do its best to increase this growth and stop any kind of hindrance its getting because of the Fragmentation.