Thanks for the link to up to date stats, so 'majority' is no longer correct according to those graphs, that was misleading. However the fragmentation picture still isn't pretty, even if improving - more than 30% are still on Android 2.x. This compares really badly with iOS where > 90% are on the latest and < 1% on 2 versions behind, so that's one area I really feel Android is lagging Apple on - mostly because of their more open nature, customisation, and the upgrades not going through google exclusively.
Ubuntu OS looks interesting but has no traction right now, I'll be keeping an eye on that though. I'm afraid WebOS is dead at the moment - choice of which platforms to target is more political than technical unfortunately, which is why it'd be great to see Google pushing a more open system which lets people use any language they want for development. They have enough clout to make that happen and not many do. I'm aware it's very unlikely as I said in the post above - There's no chance they'll do this for their current API, so they'd need to have a radical rethink of just what a mobile OS should provide.
Please don't take this as some sort of attack on Google or Android.
What more do you want, sounds like your needs are being met. Take the android kernel and write a new UI. Then you can run it on one of the what, hundred different devices that CM supports?
That is of course a huge amount of work for one person and likely doomed to failure. To be clear that I'm not blaming Google or demanding that they change, just agreeing with the OP that I'd like to see more options, but pointing out that that requires a fundamental rethink of the entanglement between UI and API. I've written a few iOS apps which use HTML views extensively and make little use of the UI toolkits using urls etc to pass actions and move screen, so I'm well aware this is possible using the current system, but it's currently a pain to try to use another language as your core language for an app.
Yeah, but what's it matter? Those people buy cheap Android phones. There are several options for up to date Android phones that are either Nexus, I mean, many of them if you're a GSM user. And many more if you want to use AOSP or CyanogenMod.
And devs get backporting of most apis via the Play Store so it's not like fragmentation is an issue very often at all.
The hardware is out there. The software is out there. You could port Firefox OS to the SGS4, you would have basically /everything/ on your checklist, and you can buy a 100% unlocked GSM SGS4 from Google and put Firefox OS, or port webOS, or whatever OS you want.
Are you simply lamenting that you can't walk into a store and buy that combo? I guess I don't care when I can follow the steps to do it myself (of course, now I'm starting to download stuff to play around with porting Firefox OS to my SGS4)
>requires a fundamental rethink of the entanglement between UI and API
Heh, I actually know of a platform that allows you to write web apps and from them invoke native code that conforms to their spec. And their vision is to have that platform spread across all device sizes. Do you know who it is? :)
It's more that I'm lamenting that as a mobile app developer for commercial clients I am forced to use the platforms which have traction, which leaves me with the unenviable choice of iOS or Android, both of which have significant warts, and neither of which leave much choice for experimentation in languages for writing apps or UIs.
Ubuntu OS looks interesting but has no traction right now, I'll be keeping an eye on that though. I'm afraid WebOS is dead at the moment - choice of which platforms to target is more political than technical unfortunately, which is why it'd be great to see Google pushing a more open system which lets people use any language they want for development. They have enough clout to make that happen and not many do. I'm aware it's very unlikely as I said in the post above - There's no chance they'll do this for their current API, so they'd need to have a radical rethink of just what a mobile OS should provide.
Please don't take this as some sort of attack on Google or Android.
What more do you want, sounds like your needs are being met. Take the android kernel and write a new UI. Then you can run it on one of the what, hundred different devices that CM supports?
That is of course a huge amount of work for one person and likely doomed to failure. To be clear that I'm not blaming Google or demanding that they change, just agreeing with the OP that I'd like to see more options, but pointing out that that requires a fundamental rethink of the entanglement between UI and API. I've written a few iOS apps which use HTML views extensively and make little use of the UI toolkits using urls etc to pass actions and move screen, so I'm well aware this is possible using the current system, but it's currently a pain to try to use another language as your core language for an app.