A friend recently sent me a link to this post titled “Android math just doesn’t compute”

The post starts by asking “What if I told you that you shouldn’t support Android?” and then goes on to list several supporting points. The points are extremely light on substance, but I’ll take the bait anyway and address them one by one.

…that there isn’t a single Android device that maintains double digit marketshare?
This is probably true, yet completely irrelevant. This is analogous to the fact that there isn’t a single Windows device that maintains double-digit marketshare. By this logic, we should not develop web or desktop apps for Windows either. The device marketshare is irrelevant. The platform marketshare is what matters.

…that less than 20% of your customers will use an Android device?
It’s been a few months since I lifted my head from coding and looked at the market numbers, but last time I did so the consensus was that Android is ahead of iPhone in number of phone users, and growing at a faster rate to boot. When tablets are added to the mix, iPhone is ahead, for now.

…that over half of all Android devices are out of date before they hit the market?
For some definition of “out of date”, this is probably true. He is probably referring to devices sold with a version of Android that is not the latest version. (e.g. 2.2 instead of 2.3) Again, this is true, but not very relevant. It is mostly frustrating to me as a consumer, and fairly irrelevant to me as a developer. One app can easily be made to run on all versions of Android. The only time this affects us is when we need to develop an app that requires a feature present only in the latest version of the OS.

…that 85% of all Android devices can’t run the most recent version of the platform?
I take it this is referring to Android 4.0. This sounds true. However, as mentioned above, this is not relevant, except for apps that need specific features - such as the new face-detection service - which are present only in the latest version.

…that you should not use the same HTML5 mobile app for both iOS and Android?
They don’t state why, so not sure how to address the point, other than to say we’ve done so, with great results.

…that supporting even a small subset of Android devices can triple the time it takes to get your product to market?
I would strongly disagree with this. Every app we build supports >97% of current devices, and the effort is comparable to building the equivalent apps on iPhone, with some added testing and tweaking required for the various device profiles. Nowhere even close to triple.

The post starts off by advising against supporting Android, and then expands on that by saying that you should not even try to develop cross-platform HTML5 mobile apps that run on Android. Android is the dominant smartphone platform, both surpassing in number of users, and growing faster than, all other platforms. Advising against supporting it, in my opinion, is what does not compute.