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Android co-founder calls fragmentation issue "overblown"

Google Ventures partner Rich Miner says regular users don't notice the issue

In a tech forum hosted by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, Google Ventures partner and Android co-founder Rich Miner said that the fragmentation problem faced by the mobile OS is "an overblown issue."

"I think this is a bit of an overblown issue, frankly," said Miner, according to a report by Xconomy. "Us techies read the blogs and know what features we may be missing. I think if you asked a consumer, 'Do you feel like your phone OS needs to be updated today?' they're pretty happy with the results and the performance they're seeing. So I'm not sure it's a major issue."

Miner said fragmentation will always be a minor problem with the number of Android devices activated each day.

"Don't forget, there are 1.5 million Android phones being activated every single day. There are 900 million devices out in the market," he explained.

Google has done its best to fix the issue and it looks like they may be succeeding. According to stats released by the company recently, the latest version of Android, 4.1+ Jelly Bean, is now on 37.9 percent of active devices. This means the new version has finally surpassed Android's most popular version, 2.3 Gingerbread, which still sits at 34.1 percent. Gingerbread was first released in December 2010.

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Mike Williams: M.H. Williams is new to the journalism game, but he's been a gamer since the NES first graced American shores. Third-person action-adventure games are his personal poison: Uncharted, Infamous, and Assassin's Creed just to name a few. If you see him around a convention, he's not hard to spot: Black guy, glasses, and a tie.
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