Take, for example, the dice roller app I'd worked on for a while. It was developed for a pretty standard screen resolution of 320x480, and the interface seems to fit quite nicely that way. Scale this up to the oh-so awesome HTC Desire, with a resolution of 480x800 (or whatever it is: it's ludicrous, for a phone!), and it looks even smoother.
The other day I tried to pop the same app open on the emulator running the specs of the HTC Wildfire. Oh dear. The screen is a tiny 240x320, which seems minute for a smartphone, and the app is unusable. Having looked at average screen sizes when I began the development, and settled on 320x480 as a useful size, it's a little frustrating to now discover that a newer device can't run the app. I can only imagine what other development teams who have put weeks and months of work into apps, now to discover that the new range of budget smartphones will require them to rewrite sections of the interface to make sure that they fit onto them cleanly, or they'll just have to put a minimum resolution requirement onto the app itself (I'm lazy: that's the approach I'll be taking, I'm afraid).
I dont like the name fragmentation, partly as its a term used for so many other things. Surely they could come up with a better name.
ReplyDeleteIn every branch of technology there are different hardware specifications available. I dont see why its such a big problem for android when everyone else seems to be able to handle it.
I hate to say if Dave but it sounds like your program is flawed if it cant run on the wildfire, which I have and has so far had no problems running any apps. And if you think the Wildfire is a problem what about the SE x10 mini?