Users do not believe that the latest version of Android will help ease the fragmentation problems.
Google has gone on record as essentially saying the Ice Cream Sandwich, also known as Android version 4.0, will act as a big reset button for the mobile operating system.
In a recent survey by Appcelerator, 78.6% of developers said they are interested in developing for Android, which is a decent number, until you realize that in Appcelerator’s last survey, that number was more than 83%.
Appcelerator analyst Michael King attributed the decline in interest to fragmentation problems. “The Ice Cream Sandwich release did some things, but you still have massive device fragmentation,” he explained.
He also called out the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet for creating more confusion, since it doesn’t even have access to all the same apps that every other Android tablet does.
Google is concerned about the issues that have arisen with fragmentation, but we wouldn’t say the company is obsessed with it. Some at Google see it as no problem, saying it’s pretty much the same as people running different versions of Windows.
Not helping matters is that the rollout of Ice Cream Sandwich has been abysmal so far. New numbers just released show less than 2% of Android devices are running the new OS, and the first two devices that tried to receive the update had to be yanked because of crashing and screen freeze problems.
In other worlds, Android 4.0 may not be the savior Google hoped it would be.
