Month: September 2013

Fragmentation is the term used to describe all the variations available on the Android platform. Android has many manufacturers and models, unlike iOS where there is only one manufacturer, and they only have 3 (or 4) different models: iPhone, iPod, iPad (and iPad Mini).

The Android Dashboard is a great resource for tracking the adoption of different versions of the Android OS. It is updated monthly and also covers screen sizes and densities and Open GL versions.

Another great resource is OpenSignal fragmentation report. It shows market share by model and manufacturer, as well as some different ways of looking at the information in the Android Dashboard, as well as screen size. It appears to be updated annually.

I didn’t realize Samsung had almost 50% of the Android market, and I expected HTC to have a larger share. No wonder Apple feels threatened by Samsung. Noticeably missing from their list is any Amazon Kindles or Barns and Noble Nooks. That could be because they do not access the Google Play Store by default. I didn’t see the method of data collection.

Fragmentation is a bit of a headache for the app developer because there are so many different variations to take into consideration. The flip side though, is the flexibility of Android has really lead to its mass adoption. It works in both the ultra high-end luxury devices as well as the low-end economy devices. So while it is difficult to get an app that works on all devices, you still have a lot of possibilities to choose from.

Want to know if your Android device is compatible with XE5? Well you can check out the compatibility lists, or download SysCheck by Christopher Moeller.

When you run it the first line tells you if you have an ARMv7, second line is Android OS version, and 3rd line is if you have NEON instruction support. Those are the dependencies of Delphi XE5 on Android. The rest of the lines are extra details for your information.

When you run it your output should look something like the following. If  those three lines check out then your device is ready for Delphi XE5 development.

Unlike iOS, there are are a huge variety of Android devices. Delphi XE5 supports the large majority of those devices. The official page for Android Devices Supported for Application Development spells out the requirements of Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean on an ARMv7 processor (with NEON instructions). The NEON instruction requirement excludes the TEGRA 2 processor which was apparently popular in some tablets (mostly) a few years back. Also excluded is the Intel Atom processor, which I hear is showing up in Android devices in Japan.

If you look at the Android Dashboard we see those versions of Android make up 87.5% of the Android devices accessing the Android store. What that doesn’t tell us is how many of those devices have ARMv7 with NEON instructions. The DocWiki page also includes a number of devices that were tested for various functions, but really in the grand scope of possible Android devices it is a rather small sample.

So I had the idea of using Apkudo. They provide an online service where you upload your Android app APK and they run it on a wide variety of devices and tell you how it did. Currently I’ve only done a “hello world” type app test, but it gives a good guide for devices that support XE5 at a minimum level.

They have 118 devices that run Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) or better (no Honeycomb). Our of those devices, my APK failed to install on 10 devices. Looking at the log it either timed out, or was out of storage space, so that may be more related to the state of the device before the test than any issues with the actual app.  Out of the 108 devices that loaded and ran the app, it only failed (ANR = Application Not Responding) on 3.

• Devices tested: 118
• Failed to install: 10
• Locked up: 3
• Successfully ran: 105
• Success rate: 89%

From what I hear it isn’t uncommon for an app to fail for no reason on some of these devices, due to other influences (like no storage space). So that rate may actually be higher. I’ve shared the full spreadsheet report here for you to look for your favorite devices. (They don’t provided a download of the report, so I had to transcribe it to the spreadsheet. There may be typos.)

I plan to modify some of our existing test apps and upload them. Since the test system just uses monkey it isn’t guaranteed to actually perform the specific actions of the test apps, so I need to automate that part of the app. When I do I will update that spreadsheet and provide an updated post.

I’m sure some people will point out that you could use Java and reached more devices. Instead of focusing on the small percentage of Android devices you are missing with Delphi XE5, I’d instead invite you to consider the millions of iOS devices you can target from the same code base. Including iOS 7!

You can get started now by downloading the Delphi XE5 trial.