After some months of only supporting a few select Android devices, Netflix has rolled out a new update that should work on all Android smartphones running Froyo or Gingerbread. According to Google's developer page, supporting both 2.2 and 2.3 should account for around 80 percent of all Android devices. It's about time we saw Netflix offer blanket support based on the version of Android instead of only working on certain phones. If you're going to keep your app from working on certain devices, using the Android version number is a much more logical delimiter that's slightly less prone to cause people to complain about fragmentation on the platform.

Unfortunately, that fragmentation issue hasn't completely gone away. Official Android tablet support is still only turned on for specific devices instead of working across the board for everything running Honeycomb, a situation we hope to see resolved soon. Whether you try to pin that on Netflix for not fully testing its app on enough devices or on Google for failing to offer robust APIs which wouldn't require Netflix to do just that is pretty much moot. The bottom line is that for a certain class of apps like Netflix and 3D games, we're not completely out of the Android fragmentation woods yet.

If you have a modern Android smartphone, though, you can forget all that by downloading the app now and watching RoboCop.

Source: Android Market; via SlashGear