Nowadays one of the most powerful and used OS is also a pain for the developers. Too many devices and customizations makes the management of your app in production a very tough job: users are increasingly demanding, and time to market is required to be at flash speed. How to manage all this madness? How to get information of a particular device that you don't own in order to reproduce the problem and fix it? Is there a global solution? Well, we'll share our experiences gained with an application that is distributed to more than 40000 users, and we'll show some interesting cases we faced with.
Our intent is to share some problematic situations we got developing an android application for a home automation product. In particular we faced issues concerning the following fields: real-time audio/video performances, networking, mobile network operator reliability, device customizations. Often the issues comes from Google market reviews, making very hard to reproduce the same context of the user (device owned, application's set, space available on flash etc..). For each case, we will show the problem, how we faced it and how we solved it using tools and strategies refined with on the field experience.