Great article today on Netflix’s woes on Android. Despite deploying to more than 200 different consumer devices, Netflix is struggling with Android fragmentation!

http://gigaom.com/video/even-netflix-cant-avoid-android-fragmentation/

Two ugly issues from my vantage point:
1) Vendor/carrier tweaks to Android are hoped to provide innovation, but they have a NET impact of FRUSTRATING innovation. Netflix is just one example of a cool capability that can’t make its way onto a device (or at least not easily).
2) Security. While the article speaks to security issues related to DRM, I believe it belongs to a broader security architecture problem. Android needs to define more stringent boundaries or dimensions for innovation, and bound the rest. There are critical security areas to confront, and if they’re not, adoption will suffer.

I was shaking my head today regarding Near Field Communications (NFC) on Android. Granted, this will likely be part of the next Nexus device, so the hope is they have this under better lock down. But enabling payments with NFC better have a rock-solid security architecture. Netflix’s woes on DRM don’t inspire confidence.

I just recently came back from Asia (I won’t say exactly where), and spent a lot of time looking at a lot of different Android devices. It is plainly clear that even the OEMs are struggling with fragmentation–as much as they love to muck with, er, improve upon the Android base, they are also their own worst enemies in this regard. We’ve been testing different phones with our automated testing tools and seeing a huge variance in reliability and performance. It suffices to say that the Android fragmentation issues aren’t getting any better just yet–and some devices are in fact far more reliable than others (I have an untested hypothesis that OEMs making changes to Android almost always hinder reliability and performance and almost never improve either). Let’s see what (if anything) Google tries to do to reign this in.