New Japan World's app is atrocious

Never had a problem with it. The only annoyance I had was that I couldn't rewind a live stream so I either watch it live from the beginning or wait until the show finishes before I view. WWE network sometimes goes wrong when doing this too though.

As long as I'm not on Android and instead on my PC, NJPW World works just fine. My advice? If you're going to use that app, please make sure you have an iPhone instead, otherwise you'll be charged on the Android and not universally.

Me neither I always run it from my Android phone and it works fine. No problems with the charge either whether you mean the fee or the battery.

What might be different for me is that I always cast to Chromecast on my TV. I've noticed that after a while the NJPW streamer will stop working but the stream still runs and I can use the Home app pause, rewind or forward if need be.

It wasn't about market share. On market share alone, they should be the #1 platform.

Google opened the OS up and let everyone muck around with it. Every different phone and tablet model is running it's own broken to hell custom build of the OS, with their own sets of custom updates. It's almost impossible to keep up with the never ending mess. Lots of bigger companies with the major apps can somewhat keep on top of it, but most can't. It's why there are no major android apps of any consequence anymore, and why a lot of apps are stripped down versions of of iPhone/iPad ones. We only have major apps like instagram, Netflix and etc. These are major companies that can afford to keep up with this, and they have to. Otherwise, it's a graveyard.

The point of an operating system is to be a stable base to build applications on top of. But they sabotaged that trying to get it out on as many platforms as possible. The solutions to this are either really poor, or non existence. Basically you'd build completely different versions of the app, and the Google Play store would show you the relevant version based on your device. Fast forward to now when we have 5000+ devices out there all with their own broken version of the OS with undocumented changes and bugs. Even 'android version x' means nothing.

Is it Android X as released by Google?
Is it Android X as released by say LG or Samsung, with their own changes that barely resemble each other anymore?
Is it Android Y with a company's own implementation of X's features cobbled in and only marketed as Android X because no one says they can't?

No one can buy 5000+ phones and tablets and troubleshoot through all these undocumented issues and release differing versions of their app, as well as maintain them all across new firmware releases and etc. A lot of guys just program towards whatever the most dominant devices are, usually Samsung, and everyone else is in "No Man's Land".

It was the same with the older desktop Intel GPU chips. They were installed in almost every PC worldwide. But they were all broken to hell, had poor drivers, didn't implement standards properly with their own drivers often outright lying about supported extensions. So graphical programs were often built specifically for the nVidia and AMD GPU cards, and the intel chips were mostly ignored.

How do you support these cards when the most expensive versions of them are still several orders of magnitude slower then the budget versions of nVidia/ATI, and when the extension function calls you have to link to at runtime (with addresses provided by the driver) not actually there causing you to read and write memory to random addresses for nothing, and getting at best a crash and at worst random bugs you can't ever fix? You don't.

So back to the original point. Making the App just redirect you to the website through chrome becomes the only sane option. Making a small app that just lets you search and play video streams off their service should be very easy and straightforward. But no one should be expected to fork off 5000+ different version of their program and do continued support and maintenance of them. Chrome works.

There's no fragmentation there. Just new devices. They all run the same software built on the exact same SDKs. The only difference is better specs every so often. If you want to update your app to take advantage of new specs, so be it. But everything works the same all across the board. Anything you code will run the same on all devices.

The problem with android isn't the 5000+ devices. It's that they all went into business for themselves with compiling their own unique Android versions that are all broken in their own unique ways.

Google tried to reign in the Android fragmentation a few versions ago, but it was a bit too late. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. And I think any further efforts to reign it in would probably lead to Android being dumped. You can't reliably build any sophisticated software in that environment. You need ONE rock solid OS, with ONE rock solid set of APIs and SDKs.