Saturday August 03, 2013

fastcompany:

Google’s Android operating system is a lot like C-3PO at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a robot that has been blasted apart into a million pieces, and the only self-contained, functional bit is being carried around on the back of a big, hairy Wookiee that can tear the arms off of anyone in the room.

That’s the takeaway from a series of charts released by Open Signal, a company that has two popular apps available for measuring your smartphone reception: one on Android’s Google Play market, and one onthe iOS App Store. By polling devices that are running the app, Open Signal can see what the most common models, operating systems, and screen sizes are being used across Google and Apple’s product ecosystems. But if there’s one thing that these infographics make clear, it’s that Android has a huge problem: It’s fragmented.