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 This can lead to handsets no more than a few months old becoming outdated, as carriers and handset manufacturers refuse to create updates that incorporate the improvements of new Android versions.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. ...

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