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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.'"
But I can't help wondering if there is something wrong with the code that it struggled with different GPUs or crashes on new devices without special patches. Most code seems pretty robust to such things.
I'm sorry, but this is just complaining from an Apple Fanboy. He's wrong on several points, and it's easy to see with a little thinking.
Android has what, four versions in the wild? iOS has 3, 4 and 5 taking up something like 15, 20, and 65% roughly. Not a great deal of difference there.
As for crashing, has he ever used an iOS device? Apps and the OS crash about equally to android.
And if your app is approaching Android's 4GB limit, then I'm sorry, but you're doing something REALLY wrong and should step back and take a look at efficiency,
This sounds like a complaint from a guy who is basically saying "Development is hard, and I don't want to work to make things good". Just as well he's calling it quits, shape up or ship out I say.
Just spent the week at the Game Developers Conference in SF and this seemed to be a bit of a recurring theme from having conversations with a couple mobile developers. The cost of supporting Android is too high in many cases and not worth the effort.
Once of the sessions I sat in on (can't remember who it was now, embarrassingly - I think it was PopCap talking about Bejeweled - not a bit player) pointed out that Android has many many variants on many different handsets. Even though the market size is roughly the same as iOS (his numbers were around ~250m each), iOS has way fewer variants to deal with, whereas Android had many. So you get to spend a lot of time messing around trying to make sure it's working on all platforms.
I've noticed from flicking through app reviews in the Market, it's not uncommon to see people with complaints about it not working on their particular handset. I haven't had this problem with anything I've tried so it's hard to tell how big a deal it is, but I don't use many apps.
The general feeling I got from speaking to a few indie developers was that they wouldn't bother doing an Android version unless their title turned out to be a big hit on iPhone.
This is the kind of BS that was stated when Windows was competing with Apple, and yet Windows won. I'm not a big Windows fan, but paying attention to history has it's advantages. I have to wonder if the frag whiners are all inexperienced brats who weren't around during the Windows/Mac wars?
And I thought Apple fanboys were bad. Android seems to be garnering its own set of rabid followers who disregard reality in favor of their favorite.
I think you will find his complaint was that he was spending all his time making up for androids fragmentation and thus not producing content.
He uses Unity which is a great tool for doing much of the underlying work so the developer can focus more on the game. But if android is dragging him back to messing around with boring details (platform specific and multiple variation for that platform) then the cost/fun/productivity balance gets all wonky.
I've never heard of it either. That so I of course don't know how badly or well the app is written. The developer says it came down to the bottom line, the android version was a money loser.I'm not going to argue with him. But plenty of other developers seem to be ok with android, so I dunno. Weather or not the not the code was good, I think there is a point to be made the android's hard abstraction layer might need some work. Or perhaps the 3rd party hardware companies are not following their guidlines closely enough.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
it's Google Play now. Get with it.
OpenGL has become a joke under Khronos. More and more of the work needed to render scenes is pushed back onto the application developer. Once upon a time you could specify the material, texture, and light parameters and IT WOULD JUST FIGURE IT OUT! The responsibility for making it run fast was up to the OpenGL implementer, not the application writer. Now you cannot draw a single triangle without a month's worth of effort to implement matrix math, texture uploading, and material lighting from first principles. And then do it all over again on the next device because the stupid chipset vendor decided that they couldn't be bothered making simple color interpolation work fast (I'm looking at you ImgTech).
The problem is not handset fragmentation. The problem is that the OpenGL API provides no guarantees about what will actually work and work well. It's all thrown back onto the application and the chipset vendors can then brush off bugs in their design with "our examples work great - obviously you don't know how to write shaders".
It's time the application (not chipset) developer community smacked Khronos upside the head and made them specify a USEFUL rendering API that guarantees good performance for application-level tasks, and decertify chipset vendors who are too lazy to do their damn jobs.
Quite right. They're clearly not cut out for the software business. They probably bought into the infamous lie that "anyone can take on a multinational corporation on the Internet." No, they can't. And these guys aren't going to make it either. It's not Android that's unsustainable. It's their business that's unsustainable.
Whoa, it seems you got hit by some driveby spinmodding.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
But the proliferation of so many different devices is not only causing problems for this particular software developer. The so called cross platform web-application is getting harder to test as well.
Windows (Various versions), Linux (Various versions), OSX (Various versions), Android (Various versions)
each running
MSIE (Various versions), Firefox (Various versions), Chrome (Various versions), Opera, Safari and many other browsers
And somehow developers are to write an application that runs on all these combinations. It is a bloody nightmare. I long to the days there was only windows with the Win32 API to write for. Good debuggers, great IDE's and mature software dev tools. At the moment it is one steaming pile of disjointed crap.
Which is why they're making good money on the Apple market, right?
They don't come right out and say that, in fact it seems unlikely given their great concern over investing "a few thousand" in test hardware. Which seems like a dubious claim anyway, because it probably costs them little more than an email to get sample equipment from any given manufacturer. In fact, the whole story smacks of spintroll to me. After all, who except Apple cares about what a boutique game shop does not attempt?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Which is why they're making good money on the Apple market, right?
Of course, other developers have had the opposite experience. For example, Angry Birds makes more money from Android than iOS:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Angry-Birds-Makes-More-Money-from-the-Free-Android-Version-than-from-Paid-Ones-170596.shtml
While their business model may work fine on Apple market, sometimes it takes changes to make money in a different environment.
It's not Android that's unsustainable, it's their business model on Android that appears to be unsustainable.
If you need anything beyond the currently supported standards, Microsoft and Apple are surprisingly easy to work with. Google just flips you the finger. That alone is driving programmers and companies away already, including one of the biggest companies in the world. Google needs to get its act together and listen better to the community. Especially if said customers have the backing of a huge multinational and are pissed off at the support it's (not) getting.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Yes IOS can be a nightmare. When an IOS update came out all of a sudden my code stopped working. I had checked the changes to IOS and nothing should have caused a problem. I was doing everything the "safe" documented apple way and it still blew up. I got a fix uploaded and then Apple had the app store shutdown for the holidays!!!! My update was uploaded to the store days before the shutdown but did they clear the backlog? Not a freaking chance they shut it down and we had to wait for weeks with upset customers.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That may or may not be true, but I honestly have seen nothing to suggest any deep thought or analysis went into it. It sounds a lot like he went "herp derp, 20% is greater than 5% so I'll stop doing Android." There are a lot of questions one needs to ask beyond that to understand what's going on and if it was ultimately a good decision.
The first and simplest is where is the growth? If sales for Android are growing while sales for iPhone are plateauing, he has probably made a bad decision. Relatedly, does having that extra 20% of his time allow him to make up the lost sales revenue? In other words, can he get more iPhone sales or more money out of existing iPhone sales or is he essentially saturated?
The second question I would ask myself is why. Is it just that iPhone users are more likely to buy than Android users? Is it that he has obviously been developing for iPhone longer and sales have established themselves? Is he advertising for one and not the other?
In other words, 20% of your time for 5% of your profits is only bad if you can put the time to better use (or would just rather have the free time based on the ROI). We don't have enough information to make that call and I don't know that he bothered to get enough either.
Battleheart's Google Play page indicates that it's been downloaded 50,000 - 100,000 times. It has an average rating of 4.7/5 stars, based on 5,374 user ratings, and the overwhelming majority of those reviews are 5-star reviews.
And if you sort reviews by latest, you can see that at least a couple dozen of those 1-star ratings were given today, in an apparent fit of "sour grapes" where users are giving the app a 1-star review with comments like, "The developer will no longer update this app. They stated that Android development is too hard for them and will no longer update their apps. Since when is objective C easier to write than java? Disgusting and Lazy!"
Yep, sounds like a poorly written, buggy piece of shit to me. I'm sure the developer is just lazy, incompetent, and shilling for Apple. It couldn't be that Android has legitimate shortcomings that Android device manufacturers could learn from to improve their platform.
The exact same argument is often made for "real" programs being windows-only.
If that's the kind of world you support, then of course you're right.
You can also see that Google is doing what it can to fix this, and so there's a good chance this will get fixed, even if maybe not tomorrow. You want perfect google support, it's clear which devices to buy. This year's model is the galaxy nexus. It's a great phone.
So life is hard for developers, but in exchange the world gets a diversity of platforms and competition.
I don't. Nothing worse than a monopoly dictating the course of technology and allowing innovation to proceed only when they see fit.
actually, i have an android phone (s2) so i'm definitely no i-slave, and the only game worth installing is angry birds (see below), and even that is only while waiting for things when i'm out. android market is full of malware, scams and games that just wish they were even a fraction as good as the PC/PS/Xbox/etc originals they try desperately to rip off. there may be a gem, but its drowning in a festering pool of shit where it will never be found by the majority
its pretty bad when angry birds is as good as it gets
iphones and android phones are mainly driven by access to social media, not games
The article also says "Rovio is on track to generate $1 million in revenue per month by the end of the year" and "In a few months, the 5 million downloads could prove more valuable than 5 million sales."
No where in the article does it say (other than the misleading title) that the free version has actually made more money than the pay versions. Right now it's all speculation. It could be that the people playing Angry Birds for free will move on to something else or it could be that more people will buy the app. We just don't know at this time.
It's a pretty badly written article with a misleading title. I wouldn't treat it as an authoritative source on the value of programming on iOS vs Android.
Sapere aude!
Chew on this, I have android versions of my apps, the market is so poor I will not even bother taking the time to hit compile. The app store monetization is at least 30 to one ore more.
I am glad you love android, have fun with it.
Got Code?
That said, supporting only 3 -4 types of hardware, instead of thousands, is considerably more predictable.
Sorry, unless you are doing something really hardware specific, like certain OpenGL ext, you don't care about hardware. I can state out of 2 years of experience in android development. And if you're a game dev, then it's the usual "make your OpenGL code run better on a particular GPU" carried over from the desktop.
Android isn't the easiest, not is it bug free. Otherwise, I find your comment out of sync with what me and 3 Android developer communities I participate in have encountered.
The really disappointing thing is that it sold GREAT when the app was new, but while the dev continued updating the iOS app with all kinds of new levels and features, he chose to abandon the Android app and bitch and moan about the ecosystem rather than keeping the Android version on par with its iOS cousin.
Then he has the balls to wonder aloud why sales have dropped after that initial burst? Maybe if he'd updated the goddamn app anytime in the past eight months, it would have done a little better.
So all I'd have to do get a couple of free phones is to send an email claiming I'm an Android developer?
True. You have to claim you're a competent one, and be able to prove it.
Well, all you Apple cultists in this thread, it moves me indeed that you hold such great concern for the welfare of Android devs, whether they can get hold of the hardware they need, whether it is free or not, and so forth. But don't get too teared up, Android devs are doing just fine judging by the number of Android apps in the market, apparently already more than Apple apps and accelerating.
Of course, what I mainly care about is the number of free as in Freedom apps, vastly greater on Android than Apple. Because Android has free distribution whereas Apple is just one giant, shameless paywall.
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