You can use the Android Support Library to include new OS features in an app that can run on older OSes. I'm still new to Android development and I haven't experimented with it yet.

I agree that Android presents some challenges due to the huge number of hardware configurations it can run on but that also increases your customer base. Android has a much larger market share than iOS and I'm betting it will continue to grow.

So if they fix or update those, your app doesn't benefit. You have to release a new version with your fork included. Brilliant!

Unless the features you could benefit from using aren't on that list, in which case you're still stuck anyway.

Has anyone tried something like Parse or Kinvey or Stackmob? They've been pegged as "Heroku for mobile apps". They claim to manage the entire backend of your app. Parse, in particular, claims that creating an Instagram-clone using their platform took 30 minutes and gives a tutorial on how. I seriously doubt it took 30 minutes, but it's not unreasonable to believe that it took days which is still impressive. As a newbie to mobile dev, would it make sense to learn using one of these platforms?

https://parse.com/tutorials/anypic

Not used it myself, but been hearing a lot of good things about Parse