Do you want to know how easy developing for Android is?
You have heard of the Galaxy S8, right? Flagship phone, lots of money invested, big company behind it. I was developing an app specifically for that model, for their corporate phone fleet. Shouldn't have compatibility problems, right? Just one thing you need to make it work on.
So we thought.
Client bought us two phones, we developed for them. It worked. We sent the app to them to test and it didn't work. Everything would crash. Except on one. Out of their testing phones, 3 crashed, one worked. Consistently.
Long story short, and trust me, this was a months-long saga, the Galaxy S8 sold in the USA has a different CPU and GPU than the one sold in the rest of the world (except for some places that imported the USA model specifically, like Saudi Arabia and Poland).
Here's the best part though. Remember that they had one phone that worked? In the USA model Samsung silently released a hardware revision that would fix a hardware bug. You could load a texture to the GPU in a specific manner, it'd say it was loaded, but accessing it too fast would hard-crash the phone, like, remove the battery to be able to even turn it off. Which is what we were having.
So trust me when I tell you, making it work on 99% of the phones is your normal development process, months of fixing bugs. The problem is that for the remaining 1%, every model requires those same months of work.
