Google’s attempt to solve their jarring fragmentation problem

There are a number of reasons developers develop for iOS first, or avoid Android completely. Perhaps the top two reasons are OS fragmentation and device fragmentation, both of which drive up the development costs (more use cases to build for, more use cases to test for).

This post from GigaOM makes the case that Google has solved these problems, at least in part. The key is Google’s Play Services.

Play Services, introduced in 2012, is effectively a background download of core services required to run apps on Android. Putting the OS install numbers to one side for a moment, this is the stat that matters to developers – over 93 percent of all Android users are running the latest version of Google Play Services.

More importantly, Google has been slowly moving core Android features, APIs and app elements out of the OS and into Google Play Services — meaning developers can ensure their apps run smoothly (with all the new features they plan to implement) across all devices carrying the latest infrastructure.

This is a very clever solution, and an important step in the right direction for Android. The key here is the widespread availability of Play Services. Play Services will run on Gingerbread (Android 2.3.3-2.3.7) and beyond, which covers the vast majority of Android devices. To get a sense of how big an improvement this is, check out the Android OS adoption numbers, which are regularly updated by Google.

Even with this solution, I still remain bearish on Android development, simply due to the overwhelming testing problem. There are just too many types of Android devices out there, and too many of them have forked versions of Android. That particular toothpaste is out of the tube and it’s going to take more than Play Services to clean up this mess.