How to make sure that the Android app works on all / most phones?

Question

So, I created this Android app and it works well on my DroidX, published it and that’s it. Now I get messages that it crashes on some phones, some strange things, etc. Yesterday I installed it on my phone for friends and it does not receive C2DM notifications from my server, and the device seems to be registered on Google’s servers, but it just doesn’t work.

Obviously, there are dozens of Android phones and many hardware manufacturers on the market. To add to this, each operator makes additional changes to the Android OS when they are installed on the device. So there are endless versions for testing.

How to make sure that the application works on most phones? I can’t buy them and check, this is absurd. So what are others doing?

Answer 1

Large companies buy different devices and test each one. We have little guys ... use error reports (either from the Marketplace or sent via the application itself) to try and debug the problems.

What version of Android works with your friend? It should run 2.2 to support C2DM.

Answer 2

To make sure that it has no problems with the size difference, see this conclusion:

On Android, we can use the screen size selector introduced with Android 3.2 to determine which layout to use. More information is available at http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2011/07/new-tools-for-managing-screen-sizes.html . The following code snippet was extracted from the same link:

public class MyActivity extends Activity { @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(); Configuration config = getResources().getConfiguration(); if (config.smallestScreenWidthDp >= 600) { setContentView(R.layout.main_activity_tablet); } else { setContentView(R.layout.main_activity); } } } 

Another good reference for size configuration is to keep the delimiter. This is explained in detail at: http://www.vanteon.com/downloads/Scaling_Android_Apps_White_Paper.pdf