Not being an Android dev myself, these are some complaints I've heard: There are a ton of resolutions, aspect ratios, and screen sizes. There are a lot of GPU vendors. Driver quality, performance of specific features, little tricks to even use specific features, etc, vary between each of those vendors, and your program should support as many as possible. Different phones have different input methods and peripheral hardware (sensors, notification lights, vibration motors, 3D screens, slide-out keyboards, etc), and trends in the market shift over time.
Compared to Apple, there's a lot of variability in devices, and that may be what they were referring to.
There are a ton of resolutions, aspect ratios, and screen sizes. There are a lot of GPU vendors. Driver quality, performance of specific features, little tricks to even use specific features, etc, vary between each of those vendors, and your program should support as many as possible.
IMO, variety is not a mess - this is has been the norm programming for the consumer space for decades (PC applications, all non-console games, web development). Fixed resolutions & hardware is the exception (consoles, and previously iPhones: now iOS devices are 'fragmenting' too)
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Not being an Android dev myself, these are some complaints I've heard: There are a ton of resolutions, aspect ratios, and screen sizes. There are a lot of GPU vendors. Driver quality, performance of specific features, little tricks to even use specific features, etc, vary between each of those vendors, and your program should support as many as possible. Different phones have different input methods and peripheral hardware (sensors, notification lights, vibration motors, 3D screens, slide-out keyboards, etc), and trends in the market shift over time.
Compared to Apple, there's a lot of variability in devices, and that may be what they were referring to.
IMO, variety is not a mess - this is has been the norm programming for the consumer space for decades (PC applications, all non-console games, web development). Fixed resolutions & hardware is the exception (consoles, and previously iPhones: now iOS devices are 'fragmenting' too)
Right, so there's a lot of hardware that runs the operating system, while iOS only has a handful of choices, most outdated.
Somehow development for the desktop or the web, where all those points you've made apply in tenfold, is still doing fine.
Not that that's a flaw in the Android platform.