With Battleheart having been on sale for a few weeks, I feel I’m equipped to offer up some impressions of the android market from a developer’s perspective.
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Still, despite those disclaimers, Battleheart for Android has become a meaningful source of revenue, and has proven that the platform isn’t a waste of time. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that a polished, high quality product is more likely to be embraced on Android than on iOS because the quality bar on the android market is so pathetically low. Here’s some interesting data: on iOS, user reviews for Battleheart average 4.5 stars (4000 total ratings), which is quite good. On Android it’s a stunning 4.8, with 1000 ratings. So not only is it reviewed more highly, it’s also reviewed more often, with a huge percentage of android users taking the time to rate the app. I think the lack of competition makes quality apps really stand out, and generates a lot of enthusiasm from app-starved android users.
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The technical side of supporting android isn’t so bad, but it is a bit of a nuisance. 95% of the heavy lifting is handled by Unity, the game development engine we use to develop our apps. Actually porting the game only took about a day. Still, some devices don’t handle our shaders in a consistent way, some devices just plain crash for no apparent reason. These kinds of issues are few and far between though – the main thing I had to concern myself with was simply making the game work properly at various screen sizes and aspect ratios, which I had been doing all along, so it was trivial to get it up and running.
The most frustrating part about developing for android is actually just dealing with the deluge of support e-mail, most of which is related to download and installation problems which have nothing to do with the app itself, and everything to do with the android OS and market having innate technical problems. Do some googling for “can’t download apps from android market” or similar wording, and you’ll see that this is a widespread chronic issue for all devices and all OS versions. There are numerous possible causes, and there’s nothing I can really do about it as a developer, since its essentially just a problem with the market itself. Based on the amount of e-mails I get every day, download problems effect 1-2% of all buyers, or in more practical terms, somewhere between two and three shit-loads. I have an FAQ posted which offers solutions for the most common problems, but lots of people can’t be troubled to read it before sending off an e-mail demanding a refund.
Mika Mobile – Android. It’s nice to see that Android has the potential to support developers, though the download and market problems really need work. Probably the most common complaint I hear about across any phone or any maker.