Android certainly has become a popular platform for smart devices. Its open source nature has inspired a multitude of gadgets, development by a variety of manufacturers, and it is sold by every major wireless carrier. No matter what Droid Does, the one knock on Android has been the issue of fragmentation.What is fragmentation? In the case of Android, its a combination of Google’s unquenchable thirst for updates and device manufactures creating custom user interfaces which can never keep pace. Th...

 As much as Google’s Dan Morrill, open source and compatibility program manager in the Android team, might want to argue that “fragmentation” of the Android platform is “bogeyman, a red herring, a story you tell to frighten junior developers,” it’s also very real.The problem with Android is two-fold. First, there have been six major releases of the platform in little more than a year and a half. No matter how you try to cut it, that’s an awful lot of revisions for developers, OEMs and customers ...

1:30 PM -- Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)’s Android platform has gotten nearly as much attention for its potential to fragment the mobile market as it has for its bevy of new handsets and capabilities. Fragmentation takes on a lot of definitions, but it remains a myth unless the thousands of developers building for Android say it’s so. The term was born from having (for now) 145-plus Android form factors, including smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, and cars; five versions of the operating system; seve...

Fragmentation is often cited as a major challenge for the Linux platform and mobile software ecosystem. The word gets thrown around a lot and tends to be used as a catch-all phrase to describe a wide range of loosely connected issues.The rapid growth of the Android ecosystem and the significant number of new Android devices that are reaching the market with heavy software customizations has raised some questions about whether Google's Linux platform is going to succumb to the fragmentation menac...

For better or for worse fragmentation hits the Market as well.

Google's Dan Morrill takes a first step towards an open discussion about Android fragmentation.I also recommend reading Chris Ziegler's comments at Engadget.