Hey Andy,
Thanks for testing our beta and for taking the time to give us feedback!
We have had quite a few issues with this work on Android 2.3. Thanks for forwarding those screenshots, they were very helpful for diagnosing the issues! We've written a fix for the issue you reported with the tap zone for the image viewer being larger than expected, and we're working on a fix for the "Read more" section appearing underneath the article content now.
In terms of images not centring correctly, we knew going in to this that it wouldn't be possible to have a perfectly centred image in every case. We've taken several steps to alleviate the problem of images not being perfectly centred:
1. Tapping on any image (including a lead image) will always show you the full size image in the image viewer, so if it was awkwardly cropped then you can see the full image that way. 2. The image in the lead panel is copied there, not moved there, so it's also still visible in its original context in the article. 3. If there's a face in the lead image, we try to use a library built in to Android that can do face detection and centre the image using that.
Given the above, we're not going to block releasing the feature because of this. It's such a massive step forwards in terms of visual appeal that we don't think not releasing it because of a few edge cases makes sense. If our team was much larger, we would spend more time on this problem, but alas, we are a small team (two engineers on the Android app).
In terms of making it a contribution mechanism to lets users centre the image correctly, we're not focussing on that right now. It's definitely something we'll think about in the future, but right now our goals are based on readership, not contribution mechanisms. With such a small team we can't afford to tackle both at once whilst also maintaining the Android platform.
Thanks, Dan