Will ICS help with fragmentation? Especially gaming?

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What areas will ICS help fragmentation. It seems the biggest issues of compatibility across devices are games. Gameloft games in particular are rolled out by device. Will ICS help with one code build for all ICS devices?

I'm not an Android developer but given the power of new phones, seems it could use something like Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer and DirectX so that developers write to one API and not specific hardware. There seems to be some level of this as well as OpenGL but is ICS making this more mature so that one game build can run on all ICS devices?

Maybe a bit, but no. No matter how great the software is, hardware is always a major factor.

Originally Posted by Theonew

Maybe a bit, but no. No matter how great the software is, hardware is always a major factor.

These issues were pretty much solved in Windows with DirectX and HAL drivers. With newer dual core phones and GPUs that are more powerful than the era of Win2K PCs, there should be less concern for the overhead of such APIs. Seems it's time for Google to add these layers of abstraction and resolve the fragmentation issue.

Given fragmentation is a major issue of Android, you'd think this would be a high priority with Google. I was expecting ICS to at least start the framework for some form of abstraction to hardware and especially the GPU. I'm not a (practicing) developer but it doesn't appear OpenGL is enough if games are being written to certain CPU/GPUs.

I've created a few Android apps, there is no hardware specific coding, you use openGL and Renderscript to do high-end graphics.

I believe the reason some high-end games are released on a per-device basis are to ensure a good user experience. Ie. they test them on the phones, make sure it works good, and then allow users with those devices to install the game.

This avoids comments like "thizzzz game issss so laggiiieeee" the comments....

Some phones are just to slow to allow them to run these high-end games (like GTA3 coming out soon), if people want to call that "fragmentation" then so be it, it's not really Google's fault. The bigger problem is the speed in which phones get the new updates (that's what needs to be improved)