Android device diversity and fragmentation charted in minute detail

If you were wondering what the face of Android diversity looks like, you won’t do much better than the chart above compiled by Open Signal Maps. The company compiled data taken from 61,389 users of its app over the past six months, and saw it running on nearly four thousand different types of devices

by Dieter Bohn

Source Open Signal Maps

May 16, 2012, 3:17 AM UTC

Android fragmentation chart

If you were looking for the face of Android diversity, you won't do much better than the chart above compiled by Open Signal Maps. The company put together data taken from 681,900 users of its app over the past six months, and saw it running on nearly four thousand different types of devices — though the actual number is much lower given that devices with custom ROMs report their identities a bit differently. Looking at the device breakdown, it's hard to ignore just how dominant Samsung is in the Android ecosystem — the Galaxy S II alone makes up nearly 10 percent of the total while Samsung as a whole owns 40 percent.

The dark side of “diversity” is of course fragmentation, and plenty of it can be seen in the data. Differing screen resolutions and different versions of Android are also charted in detail, although on the latter Open Signal Map’s data doesn’t match up exactly with the data that Google pulls directly from Google Play. That discrepancy is probably mostly due to the fact that not all devices running Android have access to Google’s app store. Whether you call it diversity or fragmentation (or both), what you can’t say is that Android users are starved for choice.

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