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Devs Grapple With 100+ Versions of Android
Barence writes "The scale of the challenge facing Android developers has been laid bare by Twitter client TweetDeck. During beta testing of its new software, TweetDeck encountered more than 36,000 testers using an enormous pool of 244 different handsets. Not only was hardware for the platform fragmented, but Tweetdeck had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android, highlighting just how muddled the market is for the open-source platform. The splintering of Android is making life difficult for app developers. 'It's not particularly harder to develop for Android over iPhone (from a programming standpoint),' said Christopher Pabon, a developer who writes apps for both the iPhone and Android platforms. 'Except when it comes to final quality assurance and testing. Then it can be a nightmare (a manageable nightmare, mind you).'"
As I say in the original post (http://blog.tweetdeck.com/android-ecosystem), it's great that our app can run on so many different devices. It has been a bit more work supporting all the custom ROMs and hardware specs, but there are more difficult platforms to develop for.
One REALLY nice thing about developing for Android was that we could have a beta period that involved 36k users. Being able to distribute the APK outside the Market was a real blessing. It's much harder to test iPhone software before submitting it to Apple.
You're missing a key point.
Back in the early days of DOS, the OS was relatively stable but the hardware on which it ran was all over the map. We wanted to port Crystal Quest from the Mac to the PC but punted when we saw that we had no way of knowing how many PCs there were that had both a mouse, sound hardware and a video card that could handle bitmap video. All of those features were standard on a Mac but were customizations on a PC. It wasn't until Windows 95 came out that Microsoft started dictating minimum hardware specs that all machines had to have and Microsoft wouldn't let the manufacturer say the PC could run Windows 95 until Microsoft had QA'd the box.
Android is still in the DOS days. Once Google gets around to learning the same lesson Microsoft learned (albeit slowly) and develops a QA test suite that they administer, the problem will only get worse.