3 ms·

Stop whining about Android fragmentation and do some damn QA

• saurik 15y ago
  "The actual root causes of our crashes were our own decisions – specifically, a stack corruption issue and a thread locking issue which took us some long nights to track down." This is the same kind of thing I see from developers complaining about fragmentation caused by jailbroken devices: that there is actually an underlying real bug in their application. Meanwhile, this shouldn't be considered "extra work": this is a bug that might show up much more rarely on the devices you support, or is going to rear its ugly head the next time the OS is updated, or the minute a new device comes out. Thereby, developers should really consider "testing on as many different configurations as possible" as one of the invaluable tools available for debugging: some classes of bugs are obvious only on certain configurations. (That all said, however, the scary issues with Android fragmentation I've head of were mostly about hardware rendering differences: the same kinds of things that bite you while trying to support numerous graphics cards on desktop machines... it really can be brutal.)