[donnfelker]

I've run into similar issues and one such always seems to stick in my head - A few years back some Samsung and HTC devices shipped with a very buggy version of GSON causing deserialization errors on these devices. You can see the actual gson issue here: https://github.com/google/gson/issues/255

The solution was to rename the package name using a tool called jarjar (https://code.google.com/p/jarjar/) and then things would work just fine. Was kind of a pain to maintain this library in sync with the updates of GSON, but eventually we were able to abandon support for these devices once the company felt the impact was low based upon the stats in the Android Platform Versions - http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

Android, always keeping us on our toes. :)