[onemiketwelve]

reminds me of this time we kept getting bugs in our app from a super old android phone from 2011. we could never reproduce it with any other hardware. There were only 4 users with this phone. We spent weeks trying to fix it but couldn't. I suggested we buy the 4 users a refurb phone from another brand. Would've cost like $300 total. Nope, not allowed. Something about not giving up as engineers.

We spent 3 weeks trying to fix it, which equaled $4500 in just my salary. we never ended up figuring it out.

[charleslmunger]

A similar story:

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41088357#comment32

Years ago I bought some Korean phone with a foot long antenna and TV tuner on eBay because it was crashing at a disproportionate rate. It was just the nature of Android development at the time.

[fragmede]

That was an amazing read, how'd you come across it?

[charleslmunger]

At the time I was working on a prototype of what would eventually be open sourced as Cronet, which was Chromium's http stack repackaged to be embedded in Android apps, so I monitored chromium bugs in the network stack component that mentioned android.

Cronet is still around, now open source and as far as I know is still the best all-around network stack for Android apps - fast, secure, supports modern protocols.