The company has modified its legal agreement with developers working on Android apps to specifically prohibit them from any action that could contribute to further fragmentation of the mobile platform. The anti-fragmentation clause was recently added to the Android SDK licensing terms and conditions, which developers must accept in order to build Android apps.According to Google's Android userbase statistics, well over half of Android devices still run Android 2.3.x "Gingerbread", while only 28.5 percent use Android 4.0 or higher.
Section 3.4 of Google's new terms, which were updated Tuesday, reads, "You agree that you will not take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android, including but not limited to distributing, participating in the creation of, or promoting in any way a software development kit derived from the SDK."
Google alters Android SDK licensing policy to reduce fragmentation
Posted on Friday, November 16 2012 @ 14:41 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck