So the released devices have bugs - same thing happened on old feature phones. That's always going to happen - that's how consumer software works. This is not even close to what happened for J2ME.

1. If there was a J2ME bug on a phone, you were stuck with it forever. Only a handful of phones received upgrades and you had to find a specific cable to flash them, so most people never did. With Android you have a chance to receive a fix over the network - that's magic in comparison.

2. You're still using Android libs to write the apps. You're not downloading Samsung SDK which won't work on Asus, or LG SDK which won't work on something else. You're publishing one package, and not one package per phone producer, or even model. Again, magic in comparison.

I'm experiencing a great low-level bug right now. Last week Google released an update that breaks SSL in chrome, google now, and the search bar. Apparently this phone has a buggy neon unit and their latest update broke the check that would detect the problem and disable the offending instructions. Even for a company with experience and talent like Google, and even having seen this bug before, they still released this code that breaks most things on my phone, and there has not been a fix for six days now. I can't imagine being a small developer trying to handle quirks like this in the vast array of phones on the market.

I looked into your first link, the linked google issues says:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: android.support.v7.internal.view.menu.MenuBuilder at android.support.v7.widget.ActionMenuView.getMenu(SourceFile:620) at android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar.ensureMenu(SourceFile:823) ...

Is this really a "firmware issue"? I thought the inclusion of support libraries was the responsibility of the developers? Am I misreading this?