Android developer Derek James:
As far as development, I know the Android team doesn’t like the “F” word, but fragmentation is a very real issue. There’s the increasing number of hardware configurations. There’s vertical firmware fragmentation in the sense that there’s a spectrum of versions in the ecosystem ranging from 1.5 to 2.2. And then there’s horizontal firmware fragmentation in the customized variants by the manufacturers, like Sense UI and MOTOBLUR. This rapidly expanding diversity is great in terms of expanding the user base, but it increasingly makes development and testing a pain. The Android team has done a great job of trying to mitigate these issues. The development tools associated with Android are very nice. But it will become more and more difficult to develop apps and games that run on more and more configurations if the gap between the oldest and newest firmware version continues to grow and manufacturers continue to release their own versions.