This fragmentation is already causing issues for myself and many other developers. I work at a small startup doing gov't work and we develop Android applications that talk to massive server based backends. Yay cloud!

On 2.2 we were seeing issues with the GC not firing enough, especially after shutting down a thread and no longer requiring the data allocated therein and thus we would run out of memory (heap size being set to 24 MB), on our 2.3 devices we were not seeing that issue because 1, the heap size was set to 32 MB, but 2, because our app used much less memory, from what we could see when a thread went away the GC properly cleaned up the memory associated with it, not only that but the same functionality had a difference of almost 5 MB of heap size. The 2.3 VM was more efficient compared to the 2.2 VM.

We have also found many issues with BouncyCastle, the default Android encryption/decryption library that we couldn't reproduce with Java JCE, we filed bugs with BouncyCastle and they said they were features/that we were using it wrong/that they wouldn't fix it. We ended up writing our own CTR block mode (no, we didn't rewrite AES) to fix one of the many issues we found with BouncyCastle.

Also, the SQLite version on the 2.x line of Android OS allows certain constructs that are technically not legal in the versions it claims to be but it accepts and ignores that bad input. The developer had taken output from MySQL workbench and put it in as SQL directly into the SQLite stuff on Android no realising some of his stuff was being ignored because it wasn't valid, no errors were thrown though. As soon as we ran our APK on an Android 3.0 tablet the app would crash because the SQLite there DOES throw errors. Yes it was a simple fix, but it shouldn't have been allowed in the first place!

We also found a whole range of issues with various different keyboards that you can download from the market. Some were causing our app to crash, others would cause the text entry field to show random characters yet when reading back the text from the field in code just the user inputted stuff was there. We'd have our software designed to have a button in a certain location but with certain keyboards up the button was no longer a clickable target and you had to first exit the keyboard. Looking at our bug tracker keyboard related issues are HUGE and there are plenty. It is even worse because the same keyboard on one device may work just fine but move to another device from a different manufacturer and it may be completely broken making it hard to verify bugs do exist.

We now have almost 20 test devices that we have to manually test our software on to make sure it looks right, that nothing is overlapping, and that it works correctly. Designing for multiple different sizes of screen, and then for landscape mode on those screens is absolutely horrible. On some screens elements get so stretched in landscape it just looks terrible and on others everything is so squashed together in portrait mode that it makes it hard for the user to accurately hit a target.

Fragmentation is driving me personally insane. I wonder how much of my work related stress is from having to deal with that kind of crap.