Fragmentation

The great flexibility of Android comes at a price: companies that opt to develop their own UIs have to play catch-up with the fast pace at which new versions of Android are released. This can lead to handsets no more than a few months old becoming outdated, as carriers and handset manufacturers refuse to create updates that incorporate the improvements of new Android versions. A result of this process is the big bogeyman called fragmentation.

Fragmentation has many faces. To the end user, it means being unable to install and use certain applications and features due to being stuck with an old Android version. For developers, it means that some care has to be taken when creating applications that should work on all versions of Android. While applications written for earlier versions of Android will usually run fine on newer ones, the reverse is not true. Some features added to newer Android versions are, of course, not available on older versions, such as multi-touch support. Developers are thus forced to create separate code paths for different versions of Android.

In 2011, many prominent Android device manufacturers agreed to support the latest Android OS for a device lifetime of 18 months. This may not seem like a long time, but it's a big step in helping to cut down on fragmentation. It also means that new features of Android, such as the new APIs in Ice Cream Sandwich, become available on more phones, much faster. Still, there will always be a significant portion of the market that is running older Android versions. If the developers of a game want mass market acceptance, the game will need to run on no fewer than six different versions of Android, spread across 400+ devices (and counting!).

But fear not. Although this sounds terrifying, it turns out that the measures that have to be taken to accommodate multiple versions of Android are minimal. Most often, you can even forget about the issue and pretend there's only a single version of Android. As game developers, we're less concerned with differences in APIs and more concerned with hardware capabilities. This is a different form of fragmentation, which is also a problem for platforms such as iOS, albeit not as pronounced. Throughout this book, we will cover the relevant fragmentation issues that might get in your way while you're developing your next game for Android.