Hey guys!

I saw some people refer to the list of supported devices for the Android app. Please do not take it too literally; the app runs on many other devices, too. Here is an explanation why you should not take this list too serious. BTW, I am a developer for Android apps that have >1,000,000 users.

1) If in the worst case the app does not work on a specific device, the app developers will see that in the crash reports they get. In the Play Store you can then exclude that device from the list of supported devices. Users with those devices cannot download the app. If something is seriously not working, you won't be able to download the app to your device if the developers at DJI do their job, which I think they do. If you do not exclude those devices, you will get bad reviews and no developer wants this.

2) The app runs on devices starting at Android 4.1 and as Nexus devices are on the list of supported devices which run on Android 7.1. This is a span of 4.5 years of Android development that needs to be covered. If you cover 4.5 years of Android history, you automatically support more devices than just 20-30.  I guess there should be moer than 30,000 different devices available starting at Android 4.1. As a verdor you cannot buy and test them all.

3) There are two types of devices that Android developers really care about: One type is a rooted device or a Nexus device so that you can install unreleased developer versions of Android. You do this, so that you are prepared for new versions (e.g. Android 7.2) when they get released. This is probably the reason why some Nexus devices are on the list of supported devices. The other type is popular devices. And here Samsung has a very strong market share. It's no surprise that many supported and maybe intensively tested devices come from Samsung.

Up to here you can say, all devices with Android 4.1 should be able to run the app. Now comes the "but":

4) Smartphone vendors sometimes do bad stuff with Android. I have seen system software for Samsung Galaxy S5 that consisted of software components taken from Android 4, Android 5 beta and Android 5 final. As a result of this, many apps did not work properly on the S5 until Samsung fixed that 3-4 months later. Things like that make it impossible for developers to give you a guarantee that the app will work on your device now and later. There are also manufacturers that change single Android components to their proprietary version which come with bugs and errors. I have seen Android devices crashing over and over again in these proprietary components. As a developer you can only say "sorry, we cannot do anything about it, pls ask the manufacturer to fix this".

Why this list then?

As a developer "supported device" does not mean, the app will work on that device always. But it means, if the app is broken, we will fix it (because we can fix it as we own this device ourselves). Again, if the manufacturer messes up a new system update, this list won't help you. There are probably 30,000 Android devices on the market and some of them come with system errors. In that case, the list of supported devices is a line of defense for customers who do not want to understand that they own a broken Android device.

The amount of issues I seen for the DJI Go apps is a disgrace, from app crashing all the time to draining battery in the background. The battery drain issue has existed for more than a year and still no fix.
All this on Nexus phones. DJI needs to spend time on fixing the issues with their app.