By the way, I ended up deleting all the device profiles, and I am now able to save and load settings from the gameusersettings.ini. On launch the app will get the active device profile name (which contains no settings), and then set some default settings depending on that name. It will only do this if there’s no save file (so ideally only on 1st launch), mimicking the intended behavior of device profiles.
So it still seems to me, at this moment, that the device profiles will override everything to and from the gameusersettings.ini, rendering androrid devices unable to save and load game user settings, while using default device profiles. And furthermore that the statement that “The initial scalability settings selected by a device profile are simply the defaults, and scalability can easily be changed at runtime through a variety of methods.” from Customizing Device Profiles and Scalability for Android does not hold true.
But I am still in need of some further clarification.