ParisLemon

Kim-Mai Cutler caught up with Hong Kong mobile app developer Animoca and notes that they test against 400 different Android devices. And they’d do even more — but many are no longer for sale.

Just look at the picture.

Cutler:

But imagine the long-tail of developers! Imagine the people who make the roughly 500,000 apps in the Google Play store. Total nightmare.

Right, for a big app house, this is very annoying, but doable. For a small team of app developers, this is impossible. Many pick the top 3 to 5 Android phones and stick to those when it comes to testing. Unfortunately, there are so many quirks across devices that it leads to a shit ton of bugs or full-on incompatibility. 

“Total nightmare” is too kind. It’s total hell.