The Android OS, despite being less than a year and a half old, has fragmented to an appalling degree. Different manufacturers include varied screen sizes, sensors and actuators. So, application developers cannot predict what hardware is available. And consumers cannot easily predict if an application they download will function correctly.

The operating system itself has even become fragmented. There are five different versions of Android available across different hardware. Developers now have to consider these different versions, not unlike working with different browsers. Developing for the latest version (as Google does), effectively tells anyone with an older version (79.6% of the Android market at the moment) that they’re out of luck.

I will note that the speaker suggested using version 1.5 or 1.6 rather than 2.1 in developing. On the one hand, that does solve a short term problem of diverse systems. On the other, it makes an unsafe assumption of developers: that we’d want to use an older specification. For most programming languages, it is better practice and makes a person more employable to use the latest standard whenever possible.

And, there are some genuine reasons for this fragmentation. With more varied hardware, it becomes increasingly difficult to include the appropriate drivers (needing to write one for every new feature for every individual piece of hardware). Some devices do not contain the memory or processing to be upgraded, which effectively keeps them trapped with their original version.

It’s this fragmentation that will eventually lead to different flavors of the Android OS, more or less defeating the purpose of a unified operating system. Manufacturers may want to consider having an easy Lego-like means of upgrading hardware, but that still does not account for building the drivers (and assumes that manufacturers would even want open hardware).

Ah well. It was a nice idea.

And now to part 3. This is much shorter because I really don’t care much for patent laws.

Patents are mostly to protect inventions. Patented inventions are protected against other people from making, using, or selling them. Utility patents extend about 20 years, while design patents only last 14 years. Utility patents also require maintenance fees for the 3½, 7½ and 11½ years into the granted period; the patent can be removed then. Patents can be extended, but this is much fuzzier than trademarks: the U.S. patent office chooses if and for how long the extension should be for. Like trademarks, patents must be filed for each country.

Patents have much more criticism than copyrights and trademarks. These include:

1. Prevention of new inventions: Pharmaceutical companies notoriously patent chemicals and do no further research with them; this prevents the chemicals to be used for other’s research. (See “Patent trolling“)
2. Complaints against simultaneous inventions: It’s perfectly possible for two people, with no connections, to invent the same thing. That does not matter for patent law; whoever filed first (rather than finished inventing first) keeps the patent.

Some interesting aspects of patents, is that they can cover things not covered by copyright, like fashion designs and recipes. It’s still under debate whether software should be patented in addition to copyrighted.