[gabemart]

I'm in the end stages of developing my first Android app. Throughout development I used the Android compatibility libraries to get it working on Gingerbread. However, now that I'm almost finished, I realize that many Gingerbread devices have a hard limit on the number of simultaneous active MediaPlayer objects that means my app will not (and cannot) function properly. (All devices tested on ICS++ seem to work fine). It works on some Gingerbread devices (and, annoyingly, all emulated Gingerbread devices I've tried) but not all. So now I'm in the awkward position of either changing the minimum API level of my app to exclude all Gingerbread devices (even though it works on some) or annoying some Gingerbread users by getting them to download my (large) apk only to give them a "sorry, your device is not supported" message when they first open it.

I know nothing about iOS development, but I'm envious of the narrow range of hardware and software in that ecosystem.

[runeks]

IMHO, Google (Android) seems to be at fault here, as they lack a proper way to determine whether an app is compatible with a particular device, without false negatives.

Instead of getting angry at developers (eg. calling it "cheating" and a "horrible hack"), who want to maximize the compatibility of their app, the Android team should add a standard way for apps to define what they need to be compatible with a device, without getting false negatives.

[bane]

I wouldn't be too worried. Gingerbread devices are something like <13% of all Android devices (out of something like 800 million). I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that people still running 2.3 are probably not people who will be buying apps anyways.