4 ms·

"Battleheart" developer quits Android

28 points by jemeshsu 15y ago

nubela 15y ago
To be fair, for every reason a dev wants to quit on Android, there is another dev that wants to quit on iOS dev.
- GuiA 15y ago
  To be even more fair, the problem he details has been mentioned by a number of Android developers: "There's a big difference between generating revenue, and "making money" - It's not that they haven't generated income, but that income is offset by the additional support costs the platform has demanded. Where did your dollar go? We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another - porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc.[...] We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable." This is a major problem (that actually encompasses several problems often mentioned with Android) that countless developers face, and that will not be addressed anytime soon.
  - napoleoncomplex 15y ago
    The fragmentation is definitely an issue for game development on Android, but there are ways to avoid most of the pitfalls, if you plan accordingly. In the end, there's always the manifest file, so you don't appear on the market for devices which you deem are not worth the time to optimize for. Chris Pruett had a nice talk about various ways to go about it in Google I/O last year[1]. While fragmentation is to be expected because of the nature of Android, the revenue issue is one that is completely on Google, and by far the bigger issue. Ease of paying, ways of paying, ways of promoting your app (namely gifting), all of these things are just poor on the platform, and that's why the taste is bitter in the end. Fragmentation is something that developers can work around, while people having no way to pay for apps is completely out of developer's hands. (Not to mention the amount of markets where you can only publish free apps.) End of rant. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdvaPyq_eBU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdvaPyq_eBU
- barredo 15y ago
  The dev didn't even mention apple, ios, iphone or anything related. Please, don't make this another iOS vs Android thing.
  - huggyface 15y ago
    Yet it obvious is. The single other platform that they support, to my knowledge, is iOS.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    Why? As the only alternative IOS is relevant on each discussion of Android and vice versa.
DanBC 15y ago
I'm always surprised when blog authors are talking about a product and they don't include any links at all to that product. I'm not asking for huge banners or marquee scrolling, just a plain simple text link on first mention.
- jemeshsu 15y ago
  I get it from blog mikamobile.blogspot.com to reach mikamobile.com. Zombieville by them is also popular in iOS. They use a 3D Unity engine to built their 2D games.
davidwparker 15y ago
Previously discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3685542 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3685542
huggyface 15y ago
I think the most notable part of this story is the...notability....of it. There are literally tens of thousands of developers on the Android market -- including many long time denizens -- but one (purportedly) quits and it gets spread far and wide: I've now seen this linked on a number of blogs, news sites, and social news lists. Why? I would argue that it speaks to an audience's bias. I think the most interesting thing about this company is that their games are, by most respects, quite successful on the Android market. A $3.00 game selling more than 50,000 copies. Another selling 100,000+. Another selling 100,000+. Perhaps they got all of their sales during a sale, but their base metrics seem quite good. I can't speak to their situation or frustration, but will make a couple of remarks for prospective Android devs- a) Cut out the crap: Don't desperately try to reach 100% of the Android base because that just sets you up for a world of pain, which I suspect is their core issue. Cut out low-end handsets, with the basest filter being Gingerbread+ at this point. b) There are actually only a handful of GPUs in use across all of the different devices (Adreno, PowerVR, Tegra2/3, Mali). Understand the GPUs, not the handsets. c) If you can't handle the work, which apparently this company couldn't, subcontract. They apparently had a successful product but they couldn't tolerate the work involved. I guarantee that if they offered it out for profit sharing to a contractor they would have many well-rated prospects.
- madrox 15y ago
  You make interesting points here. What are we supposed to generalize from this dev's experience? That Android is doomed? It does say something about what some mobile devs have come to expect from a development experience. While IOS is never mentioned once in the post, the comparison is implied in every paragraph. While this is far from damning for Android, it's worth keeping in mind as competition for developer mindshare escalates.
  - dspillett 15y ago
    > You make interesting points here. What are we supposed to generalize from this dev's experience? That Android is doomed? I think the general case has already been made: there have been various complaints about supporting Android (varied hardware platform making testing/support more cumbersome, unreliable hardware/firmware causing problems the developer has to work around (and worse gets blamed for), the number of low quality devices available (which feeds into that previous point), and that is before considering problems some devs have had with the marketplace away from hardware/firmware concerns). A lot of people have written this off as just grumbling and suggesting the people either cope with it or move on. While this story can't be taken as a general case, it is an indication that the problems might be as bad as some say: i.e. bad enough to make the platform not commercially viable to support for some. If this is not a one-off, and the issue can not be addressed quickly, it could mean significant trouble for Android long-term as after-market apps is a significant driver for sales.
jamesu 15y ago
One of the main reasons i haven't really gotten into Android development is i really don't know what i am targeting. I think if there was some sort of standardised tier system for categorizing hardware capabilities (e.g. tier 1 = basic, tier 2 = supports 3d, tier 3 = quad core powerhouse), it would help immensely.
AnthonBerg 15y ago
There seems to be a market for some kind of game framework for Android. Game developers shouldn't have to spend effort on specializing in Android hardware support. "We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another - porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. 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. We spent thousands on various test hardware." I think we could get an economy of scale if someone who enjoyed this kind of work would supply a useful platform for game devs.
- doodyhead 15y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. Maybe I'm oversimplifying but if Windows is to Mac OS what Android is to iOS, then Android needs its DirectX to make game development easier.
- illumin8 15y ago
  The thing is, Mika Mobile already uses Unity, arguably one of the better cross platform development tools. If they are having this problem, imagine what a dev using his own libraries and porting tools is dealing with.
  - AnthonBerg 15y ago
    Yikes! Yeah, in my opinion this is where Google would want to step in and provide a little grease to get things moving. In the form of some kind of library I think. It was Google's choice to allow diversity, and I can see how it would require some gardening and / or curation on their part. Still, Unity is cross-platform and maybe don't yet see themselves going this deep in one platform - so it's an indication that a middleware layer could be successful on Android.
Irfaan 15y ago
Not my insight, but one of the more informative comments I saw in the article Slashdot linked to on this topic (http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/03/10/mika.mobile.says.android.money.losing.platform/ http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/03/10/mika.mobile.sa...): I completely support your decision to drop Android like a hot potato. In the two weeks since starting as a senior graphics engineer at a middleware company who shall remain nameless, I have learned from coworkers about, or personally experienced: - Drivers that crash if you try to actually use all of the texture formats they claim to support - Drivers that crash if you try to actually use certain ARBs that they report as supported - Drivers that report supporting 128 shader uniforms but crash if you try to access anything past the first 64 - Drivers that report supporting various OpenGL ARBs but actually have a software path in fact, I don't believe there has been a single Android device that has come out so far that is actually point-for-point compliant with the requirements for OpenGL ES 2.0, yet they have no problems claiming to support it nowadays. GPU support on Android is utterly atrocious, and I've managed to learn this in all of two weeks at my new job. As someone that's on the verge of porting some 3D code to OpenGL ES 2.0, this is awfully depressing. :(
- huggyface 15y ago
  With all respects, why is that comment either a) at all credible, or b) informative? It is by an anonymous person at some nebulous "middleware" company (not a description I would ascribe to someone concerned with Android GPUs...). The problem with this discussion -- it is ostensibly an iOS versus Android discussion, as if developers have the luxury of just developing for iOS and the market will follow (hint: ha! Android made most of its gains when there little to no apps for it. Apps like Netflix and others followed but didn't lead. Now you could fill your day trying out new games and apps) -- is that there are a lot of very, very strongly biased individuals and parties, and the discussion gets completely crowded out by what often ends up being bullshit (though it takes a lot of legwork and endless excluding to actually discern that). What I like to see are specifics, but they are shockingly hard to come by. Lots of vagaries and second-hand accounts of profound all-encompassing difficulties, but never specifics that could be vetted, if only to offer a fix or different approach. In this case of the linked story the vendors used Unity 3D -- why they were even writing specific shaders (double shocking given that their top-down sprite graphics, if I am understanding their apps right, are the most bog standard shaders going) is a mystery.

28 points by jemeshsu 15y ago

nubela 15y ago

To be fair, for every reason a dev wants to quit on Android, there is another dev that wants to quit on iOS dev.

GuiA 15y ago
To be even more fair, the problem he details has been mentioned by a number of Android developers: "There's a big difference between generating revenue, and "making money" - It's not that they haven't generated income, but that income is offset by the additional support costs the platform has demanded. Where did your dollar go? We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another - porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc.[...] We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable." This is a major problem (that actually encompasses several problems often mentioned with Android) that countless developers face, and that will not be addressed anytime soon.
- napoleoncomplex 15y ago
  The fragmentation is definitely an issue for game development on Android, but there are ways to avoid most of the pitfalls, if you plan accordingly. In the end, there's always the manifest file, so you don't appear on the market for devices which you deem are not worth the time to optimize for. Chris Pruett had a nice talk about various ways to go about it in Google I/O last year[1]. While fragmentation is to be expected because of the nature of Android, the revenue issue is one that is completely on Google, and by far the bigger issue. Ease of paying, ways of paying, ways of promoting your app (namely gifting), all of these things are just poor on the platform, and that's why the taste is bitter in the end. Fragmentation is something that developers can work around, while people having no way to pay for apps is completely out of developer's hands. (Not to mention the amount of markets where you can only publish free apps.) End of rant. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdvaPyq_eBU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdvaPyq_eBU
barredo 15y ago
The dev didn't even mention apple, ios, iphone or anything related. Please, don't make this another iOS vs Android thing.
- huggyface 15y ago
  Yet it obvious is. The single other platform that they support, to my knowledge, is iOS.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  Why? As the only alternative IOS is relevant on each discussion of Android and vice versa.

DanBC 15y ago

I'm always surprised when blog authors are talking about a product and they don't include any links at all to that product. I'm not asking for huge banners or marquee scrolling, just a plain simple text link on first mention.

jemeshsu 15y ago
I get it from blog mikamobile.blogspot.com to reach mikamobile.com. Zombieville by them is also popular in iOS. They use a 3D Unity engine to built their 2D games.

davidwparker 15y ago

Previously discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3685542 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3685542

huggyface 15y ago

I think the most notable part of this story is the...notability....of it. There are literally tens of thousands of developers on the Android market -- including many long time denizens -- but one (purportedly) quits and it gets spread far and wide: I've now seen this linked on a number of blogs, news sites, and social news lists. Why? I would argue that it speaks to an audience's bias. I think the most interesting thing about this company is that their games are, by most respects, quite successful on the Android market. A $3.00 game selling more than 50,000 copies. Another selling 100,000+. Another selling 100,000+. Perhaps they got all of their sales during a sale, but their base metrics seem quite good. I can't speak to their situation or frustration, but will make a couple of remarks for prospective Android devs- a) Cut out the crap: Don't desperately try to reach 100% of the Android base because that just sets you up for a world of pain, which I suspect is their core issue. Cut out low-end handsets, with the basest filter being Gingerbread+ at this point. b) There are actually only a handful of GPUs in use across all of the different devices (Adreno, PowerVR, Tegra2/3, Mali). Understand the GPUs, not the handsets. c) If you can't handle the work, which apparently this company couldn't, subcontract. They apparently had a successful product but they couldn't tolerate the work involved. I guarantee that if they offered it out for profit sharing to a contractor they would have many well-rated prospects.

madrox 15y ago
You make interesting points here. What are we supposed to generalize from this dev's experience? That Android is doomed? It does say something about what some mobile devs have come to expect from a development experience. While IOS is never mentioned once in the post, the comparison is implied in every paragraph. While this is far from damning for Android, it's worth keeping in mind as competition for developer mindshare escalates.
- dspillett 15y ago
  > You make interesting points here. What are we supposed to generalize from this dev's experience? That Android is doomed? I think the general case has already been made: there have been various complaints about supporting Android (varied hardware platform making testing/support more cumbersome, unreliable hardware/firmware causing problems the developer has to work around (and worse gets blamed for), the number of low quality devices available (which feeds into that previous point), and that is before considering problems some devs have had with the marketplace away from hardware/firmware concerns). A lot of people have written this off as just grumbling and suggesting the people either cope with it or move on. While this story can't be taken as a general case, it is an indication that the problems might be as bad as some say: i.e. bad enough to make the platform not commercially viable to support for some. If this is not a one-off, and the issue can not be addressed quickly, it could mean significant trouble for Android long-term as after-market apps is a significant driver for sales.

jamesu 15y ago

One of the main reasons i haven't really gotten into Android development is i really don't know what i am targeting. I think if there was some sort of standardised tier system for categorizing hardware capabilities (e.g. tier 1 = basic, tier 2 = supports 3d, tier 3 = quad core powerhouse), it would help immensely.

AnthonBerg 15y ago

There seems to be a market for some kind of game framework for Android. Game developers shouldn't have to spend effort on specializing in Android hardware support. "We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another - porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. 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. We spent thousands on various test hardware." I think we could get an economy of scale if someone who enjoyed this kind of work would supply a useful platform for game devs.

doodyhead 15y ago
That makes a lot of sense. Maybe I'm oversimplifying but if Windows is to Mac OS what Android is to iOS, then Android needs its DirectX to make game development easier.
illumin8 15y ago
The thing is, Mika Mobile already uses Unity, arguably one of the better cross platform development tools. If they are having this problem, imagine what a dev using his own libraries and porting tools is dealing with.
- AnthonBerg 15y ago
  Yikes! Yeah, in my opinion this is where Google would want to step in and provide a little grease to get things moving. In the form of some kind of library I think. It was Google's choice to allow diversity, and I can see how it would require some gardening and / or curation on their part. Still, Unity is cross-platform and maybe don't yet see themselves going this deep in one platform - so it's an indication that a middleware layer could be successful on Android.

Irfaan 15y ago

Not my insight, but one of the more informative comments I saw in the article Slashdot linked to on this topic (http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/03/10/mika.mobile.says.android.money.losing.platform/ http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/03/10/mika.mobile.sa...): I completely support your decision to drop Android like a hot potato. In the two weeks since starting as a senior graphics engineer at a middleware company who shall remain nameless, I have learned from coworkers about, or personally experienced: - Drivers that crash if you try to actually use all of the texture formats they claim to support - Drivers that crash if you try to actually use certain ARBs that they report as supported - Drivers that report supporting 128 shader uniforms but crash if you try to access anything past the first 64 - Drivers that report supporting various OpenGL ARBs but actually have a software path in fact, I don't believe there has been a single Android device that has come out so far that is actually point-for-point compliant with the requirements for OpenGL ES 2.0, yet they have no problems claiming to support it nowadays. GPU support on Android is utterly atrocious, and I've managed to learn this in all of two weeks at my new job. As someone that's on the verge of porting some 3D code to OpenGL ES 2.0, this is awfully depressing. :(

huggyface 15y ago
With all respects, why is that comment either a) at all credible, or b) informative? It is by an anonymous person at some nebulous "middleware" company (not a description I would ascribe to someone concerned with Android GPUs...). The problem with this discussion -- it is ostensibly an iOS versus Android discussion, as if developers have the luxury of just developing for iOS and the market will follow (hint: ha! Android made most of its gains when there little to no apps for it. Apps like Netflix and others followed but didn't lead. Now you could fill your day trying out new games and apps) -- is that there are a lot of very, very strongly biased individuals and parties, and the discussion gets completely crowded out by what often ends up being bullshit (though it takes a lot of legwork and endless excluding to actually discern that). What I like to see are specifics, but they are shockingly hard to come by. Lots of vagaries and second-hand accounts of profound all-encompassing difficulties, but never specifics that could be vetted, if only to offer a fix or different approach. In this case of the linked story the vendors used Unity 3D -- why they were even writing specific shaders (double shocking given that their top-down sprite graphics, if I am understanding their apps right, are the most bog standard shaders going) is a mystery.