While these are serious problems for the Android ecosystem, legal wrangling has become commonplace in the smartphone industry. Gartner Research Vice President Carolina Milanesi describes them in an email as "a part of the mobile computing business."

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Still, the effects are not incidental. While it's possible that bitterly fought patent wars could spur innovation by prompting companies to design their products in new and different ways, according to Milanesi, it's just as likely to stifle creativity by forcing engineers to tackle the same problem over and over again.

IBB Consulting partner Jefferson Wang holds the latter point of view. In addition to the direct costs imposed by a loss of sales, he says, successful injunctions force Android OEMs like Samsung to spend their time engineering their way around existing problems, rather than developing profitable new devices.

As well, in a worst-case scenario, the developer community could begin to drop the Android platform en masse if it feels its options are too badly constrained by legal action, according to Wang.