I’m about ready to release 6 apps on the Google Play market, and a guy at work brought in a new phone that was running a version of android that the manifest file stated was supported and it didn’t work as expected even though it did work on the emulator. This brought up the question of
Short of buying every device, how can we ensure that our apps will work on all devices that run the versions of android that the manifest file says it supports?
Is there a suggested way to do this? The combinations of different screen sizes, densities, and android versions can make development for android a real pain.
Edit:
The part that “didn’t work as expected” was some of the javascript calls. Especially calls like window.width and window.height, the width was reported as the height and the height was reported as the width on 2.3.4, but not 2.1, or 3+. Another issue, also with 2.3.4 and javascript was the window.open(url, target) call would only call the shouldOverrideUrlLoading on my WebViewClient the first time for each target rather than every time. Again, it worked with 2.1 and 3+.
Currently, I test on devices running 2.3.4, 2.3.5, 4.0.3, and 4.0.4. I also test on emulators running 2.1, 2.2, 2.3.3, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, and 4.1 with various screen sizes and densities. The javascript bugs are not present on the 2.3.3 or any of the other emulators, which is why I would rather test on devices, they give me a more accurate feel of what the user will run into
To start, here is a presentation that discusses how to potentially address the problem. This is obviously not easy, but here is another similar SO post.