Understanding Mobile Device Fragmentation

We're ten years into the Android and iOS fight over the smartphone world and fragmentation of the platform and devices is still one of the largest challenges for mobile dev teams.

According to the GSMA Intelligence counter, on October 7, 2014, there were 7.22 billion devices connected to mobile networks. That is equal to one device per person on the planet if you take the population figure from the United State Census Bureau from the same date. That is a lot of phones, but there are not just many phones; there are many types of phones. According to the OpenSignal report from 2016, they discovered more than 24,000 distinct Android devices.

The fact that there are so many combinations of mobile devices and operating systems is known as fragmentation. This masterclass aims to give you an in-depth perspective on this area, help you to understand it and of course, find possible reasonable approaches to work with it.

We will discuss 15 causes of fragmentation in mobile devices world including Android OS update process, manufacturers' user interfaces, custom ROMs, regional modifications, various modules, architecture, modifications driven by court orders and many more.