I'd tend to agree. But at the same time I do get sick of all the articles like this one harping on "fragmentation" instead of actual porting issues. That's the clue that tells me the linked article was written by Apple fans with an axe to grind.
If people viewed this as an important problem worth solving, we'd see articles about how to do aspect-independent UIs, or apps that cleanly upgrade to gestures in Gingerbread+. Or cute workarounds for rendering bugs on the SGX vs. Mali vs. Tegra.
But we don't see any of that, because quite frankly most people don't care. Outside of stuff that directly faces hardware APIs, Android apps port quite well in the real world.
Contrast, for example, the web development world. There, platform compatibility issues have been a huge problem for years, spawned a bunch of frameworks to abstract the differences, and inspired sites like caniuse.com. The clear lack of these in the Android world is, I argue, an existence proof that "fragmentation" is a red herring.
If people viewed this as an important problem worth solving, we'd see articles about how to do aspect-independent UIs, or apps that cleanly upgrade to gestures in Gingerbread+. Or cute workarounds for rendering bugs on the SGX vs. Mali vs. Tegra.
But we don't see any of that, because quite frankly most people don't care. Outside of stuff that directly faces hardware APIs, Android apps port quite well in the real world.
Contrast, for example, the web development world. There, platform compatibility issues have been a huge problem for years, spawned a bunch of frameworks to abstract the differences, and inspired sites like caniuse.com. The clear lack of these in the Android world is, I argue, an existence proof that "fragmentation" is a red herring.