Just to give you a bit more context: each piece of software will probably have dependencies and certain requirements (like syscall availability and such), hence each OS/distribution will package such software according to what is available for each OS/distribution.

You are right that if the SMS app changes "a != null" for "null != a", it will not affect those dependencies/requirements, and thus all packagers will find it trivial to update it; however, if an upgrade now requires the availability of e.g., the library to access sqlite databases, each OS/distro will have to adjust accordingly. OS2/Warp (*wink* *wink*) would find it probably impossible, while others will have it provided already and perhaps something like Gentoo Linux will just add a build dependency.

So, it isn't possible to do what you ask unless everybody agrees on a ubiquitous packaging system that does all this for you and works everywhere. I could quote a couple of examples where this "kind of" works at a generic level, but it will a) spark a lot of debate and b) will be very off topic.

Lastly, the examples above (dependencies/sys requirements) don't cover everything that is to be taken into account, there are a lot more things