Why does Android fragmentation matter?
I was initially writing this as a response to a comment in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3443005 a now deleted thread. Unfortunately I wasn't able to submit it before the thread was gone. I spent some time writing all of this down and wanted to share my experience as a user who migrated from iOS to Android. So here is the comment followed by my response. I hope I am not breaking any rules with this HN post - feel free to delete/downvote the thread if I did.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3443202
> One thing I don't understand about all this talk of fragmentation: why does it matter? Should I care that some phones have three buttons and some have four? Should I care that screen resolutions vary? Should I care that the kindle fire doesn't have the stock android homescreen? What do any of these things matter? When I download an app, it works perfectly fine no matter what the platform specifics are. It's all android-compatible.

Compare the quality of iOS apps to Android apps.

Sure, there are examples on both ends of the spectrum for both platforms but my personal opinion is that the average quality of iOS apps is much higher than the current average for Android - a lot of this quality comes from a single device to test on and design for. Almost every app I tried for Android just felt like a html widget rendering some 'mobile' version of some site/service. The fun part is, most websites visited with safari on iOS felt like native apps - that's not the case with Android and device varieties is a strong factor here.

I used an iPhone for over 3 years (3g model) - I downloaded maybe around 90 apps during that time and bought ~40 in the same period. My highest purchase was probably around 20€ and the average would hover around 5€. Most of the purchases were performed in the early phase of me owning the phone when I had a lot to pick from. Later on I bought as something new/interesting caught my attention.

It's not happening with Android. I'm using it for almost an year now. I did one, literally one purchase during that time and it was Minecraft Pocket Edition when it was on sale for less than 1€. Based on my example you could generally forget about Android users spending less on apps because of their financial/preference differences to iPhone users. Heck, my financial situation got significantly better during all this time but I don't see myself spending any money on the Android app store anytime soon.

It's just about the quality in my case. I literally use 2 apps that I consider of acceptable quality on Android - Opera Mobile and baconreader for reddit. Opera gained a lot from it's UI redesign they did after releasing the mini version to the iPhone, the previous iteration looked and behaved a lot like the default Android browser and that resulted with a large user slash back. Baconreader is simply the best reddit client available at this point for Android but it can't really compare to Alien Blue (imho of course). I saw no other apps of interest for me with acceptable quality.

Generally I am disappointed with the OS and the apps available for it. My iPhone stopped receiving updates after 2 years of usage? Not sure about the exact time span but I remember getting them much more often and for a longer period than the Samsung Galaxy S I am currently owning and guess what? Samsung recently announced that it will not be bringing ICS to this device - so it's either root the device or stick to older software even though the device is capable of running ICS.

I mentioned that the OS feels bad. I will point out one flaw for starters but will gladly provide more if this starts a discussion. So please tell me who was the genius that decided it's a good idea to unlock my phone if I answer a call using the headset button? I hate searching for the phone burried in my pocket during the winter...

To give you a better overview of my purchasing habit during iOS usage, here is the list of apps I paid for on it. I will skip the free ones and limit myself to just the ones I found installed on the device, most names are taken from their thumbnails and the fact that I 'paid' for them is from memory so sorry if an error sneaked in.

- AppSniper

- Prehistorik

- Deadly Dungeons

- Aqua Forest

- Assasin's Creed

- Doom

- Duke Nukem 3D

- Dungeon Hunter

- Dungeon Hunter 2

- AppBox Pro

- Mobile Mouse

- TouchTerm

- Scany

- 2Do

- iSSH

- iPharoh

- Wesnoth

- Alien Blue

- Rooms IRC client

- Rage

- Game Dev Story

- iDracula

- NightCamera

- TapTap revenge 3

- JotNot Pro

- Orions

- Doom Resurrection

- Space Monkey

- Worms

- Worms 2

- Samurai

- VLC Remote

- Zombie

- SoundHound

- SC2Casts

- Spore

- Wolf3d

This came out longer than I initially intended to and a bit more chaotic/rant like than I usually like to write. Sorry for that.

tl;dr;
I used iOS for >3 years. Buying apps regularly. Switched to Android and bought 1 (for a ridiculous price) app during an year of usage. I blame it on app quality which mostly comes from device variety.