I use OpenGL for some visualization in a released app, and I have an uncaught exception handler in place to catch any exception coming from the GLThread and disable OpenGL the next time the app is run, since I had some crash reports in the internals of GLSurfaceView.java coming in from buggier devices. If the 3D rendering is not crucial to your app, this is one approach you can take so that users with these devices can continue to use the app.
From Android 3.0+ you can also preserve the EGL context by calling GLSurfaceView. setPreserveEGLContextOnPause(true);. You'll only really need to do this if your renderer is very expensive to initialize, and it only works if you're not destroying the GLSurfaceView in between (i.e. the default behavior of an activity when rotating the device). If you're not loading that many resources then initializing OpenGL is usually fast enough.