Fragmentation Poses Chief Threat to Android Platform Growth

The Android platform appears poised for considerable growth in 2009, but some hurdles for the platform remain. Google’s senior director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, announced on May 27th that its Android platform will appear on at least 18 handset models, designed by 8 or 9 OEMs, in 2009. While this widespread market adoption marks a significant milestone for Android, it could also pose the greatest threat to the platform’s future.

Open source platforms, including Android, have gained considerable momentum in the mobile handset market because they are royalty-free and allow customization from OEMs and mobile network operators (MNOs). However, that ability to alter and customize the platform source code can result in the development of incompatible variants of the platform, or fragmentation. Platform fragmentation increases the cost of development and negates many of the benefits provided by an open source community.

“One of Android’s features that appeals to OEMs and MNOs is that its license agreement from the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) does not require changes made to the code to be contributed back to the open source community. This allows companies to incorporate valuable intellectual property into their Android handset designs, without forcing them to share that IP with other OHA members,” stated IMS Research analyst, Chris Schreck. “The flip side of that coin is that it also allows for multiple versions of the platform to exist independently of each other. The large number of handset OEMs who have announced Android-based handset designs have an incentive to differentiate their product from the competition, and those efforts at differentiation can result in multiple platform variants.”

The Android platform has the potential to carve out a substantial share of the smartphone market, as IMS Research projects the Android platform will ship on over 43 million handsets in 2014. However, to achieve and sustain that share of the market, the OHA and Google will need to address this issue of fragmentation. A fragmented Android platform would result in compatibility problems for Android applications and would ultimately push the cost of continued development of the platform to individual OEMs or MNOs, rather than the OHA as a whole. Such increased development costs and a fragmented application portfolio would make competing with other open source platforms an uphill battle for Android.

Posted to the site on 1st June 2009