Battleheart Developer Drops Android As 'Unsustainable'

mr100percent writes with this excerpt from Electronista: "Battleheart's creator Mika Mobile in an update explained that it was dropping Android support. Google's platform was losing money for the company, since it spent about 20 percent of its time supporting the platform but only ever made five percent or less of the company's revenue. Much of the effort was spent on issues specific to Android, where the diversity was only creating problems rather than helping. 'I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through,' one half of the husband and wife duo said. 'We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android.'"

Comments

Re:Sounds fair enough

[guruevi]

For these devices (mobile devices) though the problem is that

1) you have to go pretty deep into the guts of these devices to get the performance required. I would compare it to some of the tricks that were used in the first 3D shooters like Doom etc. in order to render properly.
2) Not all device support the whole subset of whatever environment you may want to use. I think that was the main problem here is that you program a specific shader through eg. the OpenGL interface (is that even available on Android?) and then device x comes along and the manufacturer decided to either drop or not implement that feature in their GPU in order to save costs, brainpower etc.

Re:Horrible Code

[KDR_11k]

This article would be less FUD if it actually went into the reasons why the Android platform is unsustainable.

How about "sales are significantly lower"? They say they're making about 5% of their income from Android with the remaining 95% presumably from iOS (I doubt that Windows Phone is a factor). That would mean iOS gets 19 sales for every 1 sale Android gets. If this applies to more than this developer then it's a real reason to make iOS software instead of Android software.

Sad but true

[billcopc]

All of you who are saying this developer and their code just sucks, you've never written any significant mobile apps, have you ?

I work with IOS, Android, Blackberry, WinPhone7. IOS and Win7 are a walk in the park, compared to the other two. IOS, specifically, has stellar compatibility across all devices. I only encounted a single issue with one of my apps, when upgrading to IOS 5, and it had to do with some marginal code I was using, whose undocumented functionality had finally been obsoleted. The fix took all of 15 minutes to research and implement. Most importantly, I only need to design for two sizes: phone, and tablet. If I'm lazy, I can skip the tablet, and let it scale things proportionally. This isn't optimal, but for some apps it's sufficient.

On Android and BB, there are as many display sizes and feature sets as there are devices. Your app might look fine on your emulator and personal device, but be completely out of whack on another, so you end up having to collect numerous devices and installing a dozen emulators to cover any significant portion of the user base. Let's not forget that these emulators are horribly slow and unstable, so if I have to test and debug a build in 10+ different environments, there goes my afternoon. That's for one build! It's quite simple: for Android or BB, I typically take the IOS budget and double it. If I were writing 3D games, I would probably quadruple it because now there are countless GPUs to target and no good middleware available to abstract away those differences. Android and BB development is at least 10 years behind, in terms of comfort and convenience. It often reminds me of writing DOS software.

Windows Phone 7 is actually not too bad. For anyone experienced with Visual Studio, it's a very familiar workflow and has much commonality with IOS development. It's extremely fast to work with, and you can get a good sense of how your app will scale, just by resizing the workspace as you're designing it. I don't care much for the platform itself, but I don't mind developing for it - I find the toolset quite pleasant.

Re:Wah wah wah

[maccodemonkey]

I know OpenGL isn't made of magic, but isn't the idea of OpenGL that it's supposed to work over multiple platforms?

The point (and it was a good one) is that for iPhone he only has to do his shaders once. Bam, done. For Android, not only is he doing them again, but multiple times for different devices. His development cost to bring his app to iPhone is one set of shaders for a great return. What do you think his return is after he spends the time to fix his shaders for an obscure device that a few dozen people will likely purchase his game on? He either fixes it and takes a loss. Or he doesn't fix it, let the people deal with a buggy implementation, and then have people like you come along accusing his app of being buggy. It's a lose/lose, which is exactly why he said he's leaving Android.

Not only that, but a mature platform doesn't have issues like shader disparities. If you're a game developer, that's a huge problem you should not have to deal with across the same platform. Desktop games got over that years ago with standardized shaders for each platform. I'd forgive Android if Android had it's own shader platform, but shader differences per device? Not cool.

Re:What?

[Penguinisto]

Here is exactly where your theory went 'splat': You're operating under the assumption that the iOS version of Angry Birds is only available as a paid app (hint: your assumption is bad - the numbers presented bear me out on that). There is zero mention of the revenue made in ad revenue from the iOS ad-supported version (if you assume that the purported $1m/mo. is all from Android ad-supported apps - any other alternative doesn't help you either).

The author's theory is that ad-supported makes more money than paid versions, but makes zero distinctions as to whether the Android version of the ad-supported app makes more money than the iOS version of the ad-supported app.

QED: You screwed up in choosing your cite, because it doesn't support your conclusion at all.