Testing a few hundred devices ranging in age from 1 to 4 years old on Android isn't great. Where it becomes a tough pill to swallow is when you compare it relatively to the iOS experience.
The number of devices are just a fraction, users update almost instantly and the older devices have a matching ratio for screen size. You also get the added bonus of nearly all apple products having a planned obsolescence of about two years.
Are you saying that you personally test on hundreds of devices, or just that you saw a photo of a huge table full of phones on a blog once and heard that someone somewhere does that? No one does that. It's a dumb argument, stop it.
Is testing on Android more expensive and occasionally more error prone than on iOS? Sure. But make the case sanely with real evidence, please. This is just flaming.
My previous company had dozens of devices to approximate the hundreds (we had our own pictures of tables littered with android phones). They faced ridiculous issues like HTTP not being properly supported. Don't delude yourself into thinking testing android devices is something that it is not. It is a mess. You cannot guarantee your application will work without testing on a device and the devices vary, greatly.
That is all beside the point. My salient issue was that despite testing android devices being a mess, people are proclaiming testing android to be a fucking disaster because they compare it to what testing iOS devices entails. Everything in life is relative. If iOS didn't exist, everyone would be saying testing mobile is a lot like testing web. I'm not saying iOS is better, if that is what ruffled your feathers. I am saying it is a closed platform, specifically for hardware. That makes the story much simpler. Anecdotally, I don't know a QA that has to test for iOS and android that doesn't wish android didn't exist.
We test on 47 different handsets, comprising four different Android versions. Do you want a list?
Our Android app lags in features and reliability to our iPhone app because our devs have to spend so much time dealing with the problems of the fragmented marketplace, so there is less time to innovate. This isn't flaming, it's fact.
The number of devices are just a fraction, users update almost instantly and the older devices have a matching ratio for screen size. You also get the added bonus of nearly all apple products having a planned obsolescence of about two years.