[mkramlich]

> In theory this is no big deal.

I'm reminded of that saying:

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there always is."

I was doing iPhone development back when there was only 2 generations of iPod Touch and 1 generation of iPhone. In theory, they ran the same platform. In practice, there were several subtle differences between the hardware capabilities and resources on each permutation -- and that was assuming you were running the exact same OS version, which, in the wild, is not always true. A game that looked and worked perfectly on say my iPhone would have a weird glitch on a Touch. And so it had to be tested and tweaked to run well on each. Since then, they've added several more hardware generations of Touch and iPhone, and now also the iPad, and now there are more OS versions in the wild too. Yes, thankfully, Apple allows you to build your app so it officially only supports a narrow subset of these platform permutations. But in practice, your clients/employers often want you to support a wider set. Re-enter fragmentation pain. And this is in the iOS ecosystem, which should be less fragmented than Android.

[buster]

I did write "in theory" more because i've not developed for Android in a long time, and only know from the beginnings of Android that they did a pretty good job in supporting different devices. At that time there only was the HTC Dream and the emulator, so i can't speak of experience with such a big range of Android phones nowadays. I only know that the apps i've written back then should "in theory" also run on the Nexus One without problems.

As you are talking about games, i can imagine that this is much harder on Android as you can't rely on the built-in UI-Framework and have to handle different resolutions yourself.