I am modifying the version of the android version of the 2d texture example from OpenGl ES2.0 programming guide to change the fragment shader. this is written in pure Java a
You're suffering from a bug. I worked around by using the old GL ES 2.0 bindings to get a functioning glGetShaderInfoLog. Like this:
import com.badlogic.gdx.backends.android.AndroidGL20;
...
AndroidGL20 gl2 = new AndroidGL20();
Log.e(TAG, gl2.glGetShaderInfoLog(shader));
I still use the standard GLES20 wrapper library for everything else, so this was simple to drop into my codebase. The two wrappers apparently can coexist without any problems.