[fpgeek]

I'm curious - How many of those "only occurs on Android device X with OS version Y" issues were actually problems with the device X / OS Y combination versus how many were actual bugs that (for whatever reason) were only showing up in that particular case?

According to the ZipLine CEO here:

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/04/02/zipline-ceo-stop-whi...

most of the issues they saw along those lines were general problems that happened to be manifesting in a particular situation. I'm curious about whether or not that experience is typical or, for instance, if ZipLine saw that because they were working on a framework first and a specific game second.

[prof_hobart]

There was certainly a fair amount of the latter - couple of examples off the top of my head were things like layout on one screen sometimes being screwed up on a phone with a tiny display, or unexpected character entry because someone was using a device with a physical keyboard that sent keys that the used couldn't have entered with the on-screen keyboard. There were also a few caused by different OS versions (I seem to remember one that had something to do with either different encryption or storage behaviour on one old handset - not sure of the detail, I wasn't the developer, but it wasn't saving encrypted data on one specific device).

However even if it is a bug, bugs do happen and if it's a bug that only shows up on one out of 20 OS/handset/network combinations (if you're lucky enough to have that one specific combination in your test labs) is going to be one that's going to be a lot harder to spot than one that either occurs on all devices or not at all.

[fpgeek]

I'll absolutely agree that bugs that only show up on particular device/OS/network/etc combinations are harder to detect, diagnose and fix. But when those bugs are generally applicable (and the particular combination is just surfacing the underlying issue) I'd say it is better to be thankful they came up instead of frustrated by fragmentation.

After all, when it is a general bug that just happens to be masked most of the time, it is a buried bomb just waiting to explode when the surrounding context changes. In my opinion, detecting and defusing more of these issues sooner rather than later is a good thing.

Personally, I'm reminded me of the issues I run into when writing cross-platform code (or code that needs to work with multiple versions of tools and libraries). The upfront effort to multiple environments (or the effort required to add the new environment) is usually significant, but I'd say the improvement in code/software quality is an often unrecognized benefit (over and above the reason you're supporting the new environment in the fist place).