In all honesty, there is an interesting debate here. A lot of developers are saying 5-6 devices is sufficient for compatibility testing. But Animoca argues that doing 400 is actually a competitive advantage for them.
So you talk to many of the top developers. That's great, how about we hear from a selection of them? How many devices do most of them test on? Taking QA seriously is not the same thing as testing on hundreds of devices.
So when are we going to see the other side of the "debate"? Personally, I don't see a debate at all, just some pageview-bait article that takes a single developer and makes out like this is normal.
What I can do however, is do many stories per day, and consistently talk on background to multiple devs every week about their concerns. QA testing for Android has been an on-and-off concern for years.
Animoca has talked to me about it a couple times over the last 18 months, but this image for whatever reason happened to go viral.
This story hit a chord. I had some sense it would but I couldn't have 100% predicted it.
Now, hn, could we please not discourage authors from joining the discussion here? If you hit the down arrow and the post turns grey they really deserve an explanatory post. Even though it's "obvious".
They have an overflowing safe that is no longer able to contain all of the Android devices they QA test with...
My own app is tested on 4 devices (three phones and a tablet) and 2 of those devices were given to me by friends. I'm certainly not a top tier developer, but looking at a single developer who tests on 400 devices and saying "this is what developing for Android is like" is simply factually incorrect. Especially when another top tier developer is only testing on 30 devices. And ESPECIALLY when the vast majority of "normal" Android developers test on a handful of devices only.
Maybe it's a competitive advantage to test on 400 devices. But it's not REQUIRED, and it's certainly not NORMAL.