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Comment by codeka | Hacker News Reader

Firstly, it's not the headline I'm talking about. The whole tone of the article is "this is what developing for Android is like." Having to test on 400 devices is NOT what developing for Android is like, AT ALL.

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.

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This is "process" journalism where we figure it out as we go. I do several stories a day and frankly, the economic model that supports tech blogging today does not sustain a content model where I can write one story per day and interview dozens of sources.

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.

Hey, thanks for joining the discussion!

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".

Down votes are clearly out of control on HN, they are not working as a content filter anymore and should be disabled.

Actually the developer of two of the top-grossing iOS apps of all of 2011 just sent me photos of their QA testing racks too.

They have an overflowing safe that is no longer able to contain all of the Android devices they QA test with...

So I just had a look at the update, and I count 30 Android devices and 26 iOS devices. Obviously there's plenty of doubled-up devices in the iOS cupboard, but it looks like a couple of the Android devices are doubled-up as well.

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.

How many devices do the Instagram developers use? Since there's only one guy developing the Android version it's hard to imagine that he uses 400 devices. If he did, there would be no time for writing code.

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