Android fragmentation: the developer actually wants to buy 400 mobile phones to test

According to the news, the fragmentation of the Android system has caused dissatisfaction among many application developers. Hong Kong mobile application developer Animoca said that in order to ensure that the application has a stable performance in different mobile phones, the company had to test the quality of the application on about 400 mobile phones.

Animoca's app has been downloaded more than 70 million times. Yat Siu, CEO of Animoca's parent company Outblaze, said Animoca found that its application was used by about 600 different Android devices. To make matters worse, many of these Android devices are no longer available on the market.

In addition, there are more and more Android devices from low-end Asian manufacturers. Nokia CEO Stephen · Stephen Elop has previously said that Chinese OEMs are developing a device faster than Nokia employees can make a PPT.

If you exclude these products, there will be a lot less equipment to test. But if you want to break into the Asian market, then these phones are also very important. This poses a challenge for Android app developers who have to test on more devices. Animoca is one of the lucky ones. The company is funded by Intel Capital and IDG-Accel, so it has the ability to purchase equipment and hire people to do a lot of testing.

But for most other developers, this may not be the case. In the Google Play app store, there are as many as 500,000 apps. Testing all of these applications on all devices will be a nightmare. Appcelerator's survey of 2,100 developers in March showed that the willingness to develop applications for the Android platform is declining.

Yat Siu said that quality testing of Animoca's apps helps these apps better retain users because other Android developers are not doing well in this regard.