Agreed. In my experience, there are so many points of change/breakage that fragmentation is absolutely a problem if you're doing anything remotely complicated. We do voice and use SSL - both get broken from time to time on a subset of devices for a multitude of reasons...a phone manufacturer re-introduces a bug they fixed two full releases ago, an OS update adds incorrect proxies that break SSL, some models introduce flaky over-sensitive touchscreens or enable a vibrate feature that's a bit off-the-charts, and so on. Troubleshooting these issues take time & serious investigative work (not to mention awesome, helpful users), too. And you can't anticipate what's going to break ahead of time the way you can with iOS - you don't have access to carrier updates across the board and you can't possibly test every device/OS combo or upgrade case. You could take, for instance, ICS straight from Google, but that's missing all the breakage that gets added from the carriers and phone manufacturers...you basically have to await the screams, then apply the tourniquet. There's not much "preventative care" available.
One of the great things Google has done to help in this regard (whether intended or not) is the ability to push out releases to customers within minutes without review. While there are many reasons this lack of review can be dangerous for users, from the development side, it's really fantastic to be able to push out fixes to affected users as soon as you've got them implemented and tested. I.e., at least you can apply pressure to that gaping wound quickly.
Very much looking forward to what the Motorola acquisition has in store and am staying optimistic--one thing I've noticed is that the "dominant handset" changes fast - for us, sometimes, in a matter of months. And when we have a pretty stable dominant handset, life gets easier (the HTC era and the calm before the ICS storm was kind of nice). If a stable, Google-controlled and well-tested Motorola phone becomes the dominant for a significant amount of time, this has the potential to be a very good thing for developers.
One of the great things Google has done to help in this regard (whether intended or not) is the ability to push out releases to customers within minutes without review. While there are many reasons this lack of review can be dangerous for users, from the development side, it's really fantastic to be able to push out fixes to affected users as soon as you've got them implemented and tested. I.e., at least you can apply pressure to that gaping wound quickly.
Very much looking forward to what the Motorola acquisition has in store and am staying optimistic--one thing I've noticed is that the "dominant handset" changes fast - for us, sometimes, in a matter of months. And when we have a pretty stable dominant handset, life gets easier (the HTC era and the calm before the ICS storm was kind of nice). If a stable, Google-controlled and well-tested Motorola phone becomes the dominant for a significant amount of time, this has the potential to be a very good thing for developers.