Lord_Reed: The Android fragmentation is a pain for many people and seems to frustrate those who should be having an easy time of making use of the OS and its ecosystem.

In this thread I want to see if we can discuss possible solutions.

I think two solutions to the fragmentation are:

1. Let the OEMs be mandated to ship stock Android on their phones by Google then offer their UI customizations as downloadable content. This would solve the update issue as all Google has to do is create the stock ROMs with hooks for the UI customizations. Everything pretty much runs as an app so this shouldn't be hard and since Google has to optimize the OS for wide range of hardware they'd be forced to make it more efficient in utilizing system resources.

2. Google should create an app zoom-er native to the OS and declare a particular size for all apps as standard for all app developers to use. The app zoom-er will scale the app to the screen size on the current hardware the app is running on.
This should help app developers cut down on the number of adjustments they have to make and possible even out the fragmentation between phones and tablets.

What is your idea?

Lord_Reed: The Android fragmentation is a pain for many people and seems to frustrate those who should be having an easy time of making use of the OS and its ecosystem.

In this thread I want to see if we can discuss possible solutions.

I think two solutions to the fragmentation are:

1. Let the OEMs be mandated to ship stock Android on their phones by Google then offer their UI customizations as downloadable content. This would solve the update issue as all Google has to do is create the stock ROMs with hooks for the UI customizations. Everything pretty much runs as an app so this shouldn't be hard and since Google has to optimize the OS for wide range of hardware they'd be forced to make it more efficient in utilizing system resources.

2. Google should create an app zoom-er native to the OS and declare a particular size for all apps as standard for all app developers to use. The app zoom-er will scale the app to the screen size on the current hardware the app is running on.
This should help app developers cut down on the number of adjustments they have to make and possible even out the fragmentation between phones and tablets.

What is your idea?

jedisco:

The reason is simple. The official customization on Android is just too much. Worse still is that majority of them are not useful.

OEMs should be allowed to make very minimal changes to the android UI so that updates can be done easily. The rest should come with hacks and custom roms as those are won't affect the update process.

Also, Google should try and standardize the processors used just like Microsoft is doing with WP and Qualcomm. It doesn't have to be just one vendor, but they should reduce the number used.

puskin:

Its those UI customizations that differentiates OEMs from OEMs. Besides... UI customizations does help in selling the phone too.

IMO...in as competition is good, the no. of
OEMs that make use of Andriod should be
cut down. I think they are getting beyond
Google's control.