Fragmentation has been particularly bad for Android in the past, but has it improved by much in the past few months?

Not too long ago Google promised that it would deliver updates to the Android OS more promptly in an effort to reduce fragmentation and allow the OS to grow steadily and rapidly, an 18 month cycle is what was promised if I recall correctly. Despite Google's efforts to get the latest and greatest versions of Android out to consumers quickly, 12% of Android devices are running an iteration of Android below 2.3.3 "Gingerbread." Although this number is dropping rather drastically every time Google publishes the data, a large amount of devices have not been updated to 4.1.1 Jelly Bean, which has some of the most drastic improvements for performance thanks to the introduction of project butter into the code.

What Google seemed to have forgotten when it said it would attempt to update more devices more quickly to the latest version of Android is that device manufacturers like Samsung and HTC have the right to modify the Android OS before releasing it to their devices, which lengthens the amount of time it takes for devices to receive software updates. Google Nexus devices get to enjoy the latest software updates from Google sometimes months before other devices get them. This is bad news in terms of applications because it means that applications are no always optimized as they should be.

The fact that Android is Open Source has its ups and downs. While it allows for a generally great development community and good added features from the phone manufacturers, it also does mean that the development of Android is largely dependent on the device manufacturers to keep up with stock Google Android. Although the gap between devices is rapidly closing it still exists and will likely remain one of Androids weaknesses for some time, at least for non-Nexus users.