What does the year have to do with it? 2014 isn't the year Google fixed Android fragmentation. It isn't the year it managed to get OEMs and carriers to start shipping timely OS updates. It isn't the year Android users started actually buying stuff. I'm an Android user, so I'm just as frustrated by it as you, but it's a problem inherent to Android, not to the developers.
I think a significant part of this problem is that it's hard to know when choosing an Android device exactly what tradeoffs you're making. How many reviews include information about the quality and calibration of the gyroscope, motion sensor and magnetometer systems? Other than perhaps some test shots, how much do you really know about the camera quality? Are all the relevant APIs implemented, and how good a job are the drivers doing?
It's great the Android offers so much choice in terms of features and price, but the upshot is that you're not buying a device with an android sized slice of market share from the point of view of app support, for many purposes you're buying a device with a that-device sized slice of market share.
In the old PC days the exact spec of a machine didn't usually matter much. However for mobile devices, the plethora of advanced sensors they come with and the complexity of software capabilities that take advantage of them has made fragmentation a much bigger issue, but really only if you're interested in the most advanced features.
For most phone users it doesn't make that much difference, but if you're interested in cutting edge features the quality of hardware and software integration and application support has become critical. Samsung almost has enough critical mass to establish a stable platform for advanced Android applications, but the problem is it just doesn't have the vision and discipline to do so by actually establishing a stable baseline for the features and software in it's phones.
In this particular case, they specifically say it is because they are waiting for certain Camera API changes. I suspect it is probably related to the need to gather gyroscope / accelerometer data that is keyed to the individual frames of the video.
Instagram is certainly capable of putting out apps for both platforms simultaneously. I don't think they wouldn't fail on that without a good reason.
Besides the fact that it's monumentally more difficult to support all Android platforms instead of one iOS platform, Do you get Mac versions of software at the same time as Windows?
(the simple answer is 'usually no' because it would mean the porting team would have to be working with the main dev team and the launch delayed until the port was done)
I get this complaint all the time and it's getting old. What's clear to developers is usually not to the user, that the combination of device + hardware + os makes developing "an Android version" a royal pain in the app store.
Some of the smaller shops including solo founders and two man teams only have the resources to build one app at a time. If they're building something in their spare time, it's even harder.
It's not the end of the world. I'm sure Android version will be developed faster than Instagram for Android was. My guess it this has to do with a lot of Camera API tuning since it uses the gyros on the phone to stabilize. Easier to do it on iOS and get to market with a decent user base, then start figuring out Android devices one by one.
Hopefully the new Camera API in Android L makes this app possible -- you have much better control of the incoming frames with accurate timestamps, so matching them up to recorded gyroscope information and cropping/offsetting them before writing them out to the encoder would be much easier.
