[mattlondon]

+1 I have a few hobby apps on the app store that gave had a few thousand downloads. Not a huge sample but generally speaking it's N+ that has the vast majority of users. My apps are fairly standard or are games - most API levels since M seem to basically cover everything I need 99% of the time.

I have no interest AT ALL in the manufacturer of the device.

Fragmentation simply doesn't feel like an issue, at least to me.

[Avamander]

Fragmentation becomes an issue when you're either building services that run in the background or interact with hardware (BT, WiFi, WiFi-direct, Camera, GNSS, Gyro/Accel). I feel fragmentation hard with my app.

[on_and_off]

For the background WorkManager has done wonders.

For hardware, I believe that 100%. I am talking about "regular" android apps that don't need deep access to the hardware. By deep I mean something harder than recording something (e.g. taking/picking a picture is delegated to the default system app, not the one you build) or displaying the current position with a mapping sdk.

Bluetooth in particular I can believe. It is amazingly complex and adding the OEMs customizations on top must be a total pain.

[pjmlp]

On ADB Podcast about Bluetooth, they referred that certain models would just crash if someone tries to talk with specific protocol versions.

[megy]

I mean, what? You are like a local store with foot traffic complaining about the global internet restrictions. Of course it doesn't affect you.

[threeseed]

Fragmentation is an issue if you're at an enterprise or building a mass market product however.

Then you can't just ignore large percentages of the market.

[on_and_off]

One of my previous job was for one of the big music streaming services.

So very much a mass market product :)

As stated above, what we did was that when we decided to "drop support" for an API level, what it meant was that we would freeze an apk that would be delivered to these older devices and have a higher min api level for the new app versions.

The burden might higher on the backend people not to break the old endpoints than for us.. these old apks need to continue working. Technically we were supporting these frozen legacy apks, but since we have chosen particularly stable app releases for this, in practice we never touched them.

Weird corner cases/devices were indeed a bit more of a concern. And to be explicit, that was never a significant amount of our time. I was part of the more senior team that had to (among many other things) deal with that, and I don't think it has been more than 5% of my time (and 5% of the time of 2 other colleagues, whereas the 20 others not in our team did not have to deal with it at all).

As far as I can tell it is the result of :

- at this scale, if something can break, it will break. when you have millions of daily users, all of your app issues will be uncovered (and to be honest, there was a ton of these... we inherited some very awful code in some crucial areas)

- mass market means that you will see all kind of devices connecting to your service, including weird no names chinese devices that have not been certified by google. So they did not have to pass the compatibility test suite that devices shipping with the play store have to satisfy. This has been getting better and better year after year but at first you could see some "exotic" behaviors.

- mass market also means that people will try everything in order to use your product for free. Although to be honest 99% are refreshingly naive. Like somebody distributing a "cracked" apk letting you get one month of premium for free. We decompiled that version and could not figure out what had changed .... until we tried it and.. oh man, so that "hack" is just that we we offering a one month free trial at that time .. Nothing nefarious here, just the same free month you would have gotten for a new account by downloading the official apk from the play store.