Originally Posted by
acunningham
Agreed. For most real-world Android development, fragmentation is a fairly minor issue, and one that can be easily overcome. The main exceptions are games, which are much more demanding in terms of screen layout and hardware performance.
Screen layout is a solved problem on the PC side. Hardware performance, and I'd imagine some GPU quirks as well, not so much... and in that sense, Apple certainly has an advantage since there's a single spec per generation (although a pretty long trailing edge of generations, on either.)
From my end, I don't really see either iOS or Android as a good gaming platform; touch screens suck for serious gaming since you lose a lot of visual area to on-screen controls, and they're wickedly imprecise. Further, nobody seems to be willing to pay console/PC game prices on phones, which means they won't support the same quality of titles (on their own) as consoles/PCs or even gaming handhelds (which already have to have cheaper games.)
That said, while I don't personally get the appeal, there sure seems to be plenty of money to be made on both casual games, and porting older titles back to the phone market.