Originally Posted by
Xplode22 I don't think most of us can imagine all the areas for possible for issues. I'm certainly not a BB development expert, but I have been developing for software for 15 years now. The possible variations between users phones are probably enormous.
Many people have touched on the obvious - we are running MANY different types of 3rd pary applications. AND many different VERSIONS of these applications. Some of these are native to (specifically developed for) the Storm, but MANY are not. We have no idea how non-native apps may interact with OS and/or hardware.
The next thing that people have mentioned is the hardware. I agree that - more than likely - not everyone is running the exact same hardware. Maybe that's something RIM should have tried to control better but it's probably just the reality now. I imagine they have as many different phones to test on as they can.
The one thing that has hardly been mentioned (and IMO is very important) is that there are also MANY variations to how each phone is setup. Think of all the different settings you have on the Storm. The OS itself can probably be setup in thousands of various ways (i.e., all the settings for keyboard, backlighting, GPS, screen, mobile network, etc, etc, etc). Go into Options and look at how many things you can set! The developers have to somehow account for as many variations that may affect something as they can. But they won't be able to catch every variation. And THEN, each native app (email, browser, BB Maps, calendar, etc) can have X number of variations in their settings. The task is really quite enormous.
After making changes, the developers will probably start unit testing against a "clean" OS build with a "standard" setup. But to reproduce/test a specific problem, they would need to have the exact settings/options that created the issue.
It's the same with PC development - especially OS development. The amount of variations between users systems is staggering! Most of you just cannot imagine. You just want it to work (understandably) but it is a BIG task. I think RIM is making good progress, but it's a difficult task and there will always be problems on specific phones with specific settings and specific OS releases. It's just the nature of the beast.