Analyst: Android faces fragmentation challenges

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) senior director of mobile platforms Andy Rubin announced last week at Google’s developer conference that the Android platform will make its way to 18 to 20 handsets spanning eight or nine handset makers within the year. When Google takes this leap from its two handsets – T-Mobile and HTC’s G1 and the European G2– to 20, it will be a significant milestone for Android, but it will also create the biggest possible threat to the platform’s future, according to IMS Research analyst Chris Schreck.

Schreck said that fragmentation resulting from the proliferation of devices will become a problem for the whole Android ecosystem, including third-party developers, mobile network operators (MNOs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) developing custom user interfaces (UIs) or proprietary software for the open-source platform. The Open Handset Alliance (OHA), the mobile operators’ alliance created to promote the software, will license one particular form of Android to each OEM or MNO, which in turn will split into multiple incompatible strains on the platform itself, Schreck said. The end result will be that applications and handset makers’ custom software will only be available for certain handsets and not others. It will increase the cost of developing and maintaining that platform for every company involved, he said.

“The idea of open source is to spread the cost of platform maintenance and evolution across the entire open source community and all the participants in the OHA, rather than having specific OEMS and MNOs having to bear the cost of making their own version of the platform entirely themselves,” Schreck said. 

Other open-source operating systems, including Symbian and Linux Mobile, have their own terms and conditions in their software licenses that require any changes to the code to be contributed back to the managing group, Symbian Foundation and LiMo Foundation, respectively. That way, the organization can keep track of everything changing in the platform and evolve it across all the supporting handsets as one. The downside of this approach, Schreck said, is that companies are slow to incorporate some of their most valuable intellectual property because they don’t want to share it with the Foundation and make it available to other members. While Google is protecting handset makers’ intellectual property, it is still making a trade off for increased fragmentation and costs.

“The key is not necessarily to focus on the number of handset designs, but the OHA has to have the ability to maintain the platform as it exists in one form across a number of different OEM designs,” Schreck said.

HTC has the only two handsets commercially available today, but vendors including Motorola, Samsung,  Sony Ericsson, Asus-Garmin and, most recently, Acer have all promised to release Android-based phones within the year. At Google’s conference, HTC also announced that its follow-up to the G1, the HTC Magic, will be available in the United States starting next month.

In total, IMS predicts that Android will ship more than 43 million handsets in 2014, giving it a substantial share of the smartphone market. Schreck adds the qualification, however, that the OHA and Google will have to address fragmentation if they are to achieve and sustain this market share. If it doesn’t, Android will face an uphill battle against other open-source platforms on the market, he said.

“Google said it is up for the OEMS and MNOs not to fragment the platform,” Shcreck said. “I don’t know if that is laissez faire approach is sufficient.”