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Software Engineering vocabulary · Testing

Device fragmentation

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, device fragmentation means: The wide variety of devices, screen sizes, hardware and operating system versions an app must work on, which makes testing harder, especially on Android.

In Turkish: cihaz çeşitliliği, cihaz parçalanması

How it is used

Android developers often mention fragmentation to explain why a bug appears only on one manufacturer's phones. Teams handle it with device labs, cloud testing services such as Firebase Test Lab, and analytics that show which devices their users actually have.

Example sentences

  1. Device fragmentation means we can't test on every phone, so we focus on the top 20 models.

  2. Device fragmentation is the main reason our Android QA takes longer than iOS.

Common collocations

  • device fragmentation
  • Android fragmentation
  • OS fragmentation
  • deal with fragmentation
  • AndroidGoogle's mobile operating system, used by many phone makers such as Samsung, Xiaomi and Google itself. Its apps are mainly written in Kotlin or Java.
  • UI testAn automated test that uses the app the way a person would, tapping buttons, typing text and checking what appears on the screen.
  • screen densityHow many pixels a screen has in a given physical area, measured in dots per inch (dpi); high-density screens need larger image files to look sharp.
  • emulatorA program that copies the hardware and software of a mobile device on a computer, so you can run and test an app without a real phone.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Testing

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