> With decent technical design and Google's Android support library you can pretty much code as if 98% of people run KitKat and not worry about it
People say this. It's not really actually true.
A nice little example encountered recently. Say you have a HTTP server which uses gzip or deflate when the client asks it to. Pretty standard, right? And say you want to return a HTTP 204, or other contentless success. Seems reasonable? And if you do this on Android 4.4 using the standard HTTP client, it will work. If you do it on Android 4.1 (the most commonly-deployed version of Android), it will throw a null pointer exception deep in the library code.
This is just one of many issues. Compatibility support libraries are all very well, but they don't really help with the standard libraries being buggy, and those bugs will _never be fixed_ for the vast majority of users.
People say this. It's not really actually true.
A nice little example encountered recently. Say you have a HTTP server which uses gzip or deflate when the client asks it to. Pretty standard, right? And say you want to return a HTTP 204, or other contentless success. Seems reasonable? And if you do this on Android 4.4 using the standard HTTP client, it will work. If you do it on Android 4.1 (the most commonly-deployed version of Android), it will throw a null pointer exception deep in the library code.
This is just one of many issues. Compatibility support libraries are all very well, but they don't really help with the standard libraries being buggy, and those bugs will _never be fixed_ for the vast majority of users.
It gets even worse when you take OEM crap into account. Want to use the camera? You'd better know about obscure Samsung quirks: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13448731/does-samsung-gal...