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Comment by MilesTeg | Hacker News Reader

From a developer's standpoint it does matter. Every OS version, hardware version is another platform you have to support and test against. Even on identical hardware with an incremental version difference it is not uncommon for some strange edge case to cause something to break.

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Simply not true - as long as you don't use internal APIs, apps made for an older Android are completely compatible in newer ones, and new APIs are usually backported to older Android versions with compatibility libraries. When you update your Android OS, all of your apps will continue to work the same and you don't even notice.

Contrast this to iOS - whenever there is a new iOS version, developers have to scramble to update their apps because they very often break or the UI is broken by changes, etc.

Android is much much less hassle when OS updates roll around, and I develop for both.

I back RyanZAG here (hey Ryan :) ). I went from 4.1.2 to 4.2, 4.3 and now 4.4.2 without hassles. The exception is KitKat where a lot of developers updated their apps specifically to support the new ART.

[Rant]: I find that it gets a bit silly in iOS land, in the sense that local (South African) devs who have abandoned/flopped apps had to go and update their apps after forever to match the 'look and feel' of the new iOS, whereas with Android one can go without noticing that.

As someone who has done a fair bit of Android development, it's ironic that you mention that. The Android design guidelines tend to change on six month basis, and not always for the better. Sure, the changes are usually smaller, but it can get pretty annoying after a while.

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