said by CanadianRip:said by Guspaz:The iPad Mini is selling like gangbusters, stealing back a lot of lost marketshare for Apple. I think their general lack of software innovation is going to hurt them in the mid-term if not addressed soon, but I don't think the iPad Mini has anything to do with that.
The problem here is innovating as one, versus an entire giant group of people. Everyone yaks about "Fragmentation" like it's a bad thing.
Flip the word to diversity; which means the same thing. Now you realize it's actually an advantage. If you allow innovators to do what they want with minimal disruption and intervention - that's a good thing.
This is why the PC dominated for decades - it was the easiest platform to get done what you wanted! Want to build an Air Traffic Control system, no problem you're free to do with the hardware/software as you please.
Can't say the same about any platform other then Android at the moment.
When discussing Android, fragmentation refers to software and not hardware, because after all, Android is software, not hardware.
The PC was about having hardware for which anybody could write the software. It could run Linux, Unix, Windows etc.
Android devices run Android. End of story.
Fragmentation is a problem because of the jump in features available with Android 4.0. Developers wanting to incorporate those features ended up making apps incompatible with older versions of Android, the still popular and present Gingerbread (2.3).
It is similar to the problem Microsoft had with IE 6. People were too reluctant or slow to switch and that made developing web apps more difficult.
Similarly, people developing apps for ICS aren't able to sell those apps to Gingerbread users unless they go to lengths to make them compatible or have a different version.
That means Android developers can't make 1 app and sell to everybody. Gingerbread still has significant market share.
iPhone devs on the other hand can easily develop 1 application and sell to all iPhone users except for those whose handsets are outdated and no longer get updates, but by that point those users will be able to upgrade as their contracts expire.
That means developers have an incentive to develop for iPhone over Android.
This isn't such an issue now because most phones released over the past couple of years have been released with ICS or upgraded to ICS, but the next time there is a big update and new features, this fragmentation will become a huge issue all over again.