Yes, Symbian is the platform I was thinking of. Some of the problems can be alleviated by ignoring old devices (N95 era and before) or by ignoring all non-touch devices. But, even then, you have lots of variations between the remaining devices.
Symbian had no fragmentation control..at all. Even within Nokia different teams would randomly change public API's in the most insidious of ways. The real issues on Symbian weren't different models/screen sizes (hell, S60 phones had more or less standardized feature sets). It was the lack of any real control over the platform itself. As a developer you had to constantly deal with functional side-effects changing (and Symbians lack of coherent architecture, design, and quality meant there are a LOT of functional side-effects).
So the situation is definitely not Apple-to-Apple's. I really think you need to start thinking about Android in two generations. 1.x was all about getting competitive with the iPhone. From 2.x onwards I think we're going to see much more platform stability. Fewer OS releases and a higher emphasis on maintaining phone compatibility. We've already seen that in the first two releases of the 2.x series.
Or really, any computer supporting OpenGL. This stuff is always an issue: figuring out the correct depth buffer size (not as much of a problem as it used to be), finding the vendor-specific version of the extensions you need to use, different pixel/vertex shader versions which require completely different code... It's always a pain in the ass.
Don't forget the bugs! Apple in particular has done exactly what he's accusing Google of doing: They ignored GL bugs in older versions of OS X, since they were fixed by the newer versions. They go as far as to delete (or hide?) discussion threads from the public Apple forums that talk about bugs they don't want to fix.
In their case it's more evil, though: They actually profit by ignoring older bugs, because they sell new versions of the OS to people who get sick of things not working. But as a game developer, we've had to still work around their bugs so as to support the people who haven't upgraded.
Story's the same here, except now it's not even an option for the consumer to upgrade (short of jailbreaking their phones in most cases).
i once got a gps with windows CE. i tried to develope a small utility program. it took me a couple days just to figure out the windows CE type i had there.
