On more data point here: we just ported our fairly complex app (a file manager) from Honeycomb back to Froyo. If we had access to that many devices, of course we would have tested it on all of them, but our experience has been that using a few devices and some emulator configurations you can do surprisingly well enough. Not a single complaint so far, although admittedly our user base only approaches about 20k.
I think these articles exaggerate the effect of the fragmentation. It exists, it costs us developers some time and money, but not even close to being a "nightmare".
When I heard developers complain about Android fragmentation first-hand, most of them complained about GPUs, and Animoca's home page shows games first and foremost. I wouldn't be surprised if the need for hundreds of devices differed very much across application types.
On more data point here: we just ported our fairly complex app (a file manager) from Honeycomb back to Froyo. If we had access to that many devices, of course we would have tested it on all of them, but our experience has been that using a few devices and some emulator configurations you can do surprisingly well enough. Not a single complaint so far, although admittedly our user base only approaches about 20k.
I think these articles exaggerate the effect of the fragmentation. It exists, it costs us developers some time and money, but not even close to being a "nightmare".