You can always hear many game developers whisper FFS, another change in the Google developer console making it even more confusing to use than before or how many more devices now run a version of android. The last time I checked. Around 14800+ different devices run android that supported my app. With so many different handset models, versions of Android running on them, I believe this is now known as the “Fragmented Market”. Many cheap devices have slow CPU and low memory and while a small app may run perfectly well, resource hungry games will not.
There is an interesting article to read about this subject: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/170689/Dealing_with_Androids_fragmented_market.php
For me, making a game and releasing it on the mobile platform, I want the game to be as playable as possible from a frame rate point of view and in my testing, there is no real way to work out how fast the game is running in frames per second. I did have a routine where I ran a small test to see how many images could be loaded into memory in a few seconds and found some devices have fast memory and a slow CPU. My code checking the device would say “yes” it can move data fast but in game, I could see low frame rate so had to ditch this idea. For “Jetman Galactic Mars” which is very CPU heavy, the only way to allow me to release the game has been to devices with newer faster chipsets like the Samsung Note 9 upwards. I asked a few devs their thoughts on this and they said not to bother releasing on this platform. Let’s see how we go with this limited device release. In testing my games, an iPhone 6 was as fast as the Samsung Galaxy 10. It’s a no brainer to stick with Apple as the primary platform.
I love publishing to iOS as a game dev as I only have to support a few devices. If testing performance on an iPhone 6 is good, then it’s job done! The only thing to test is resizing the game to different phone/tablet screen sizes. Doing some math, you can have a routine that covers all phone/tablet sizes.
Another plus as an Apple Developer is the App Store Connect where we configure the app store information, upload a build, use test flight to allow testers to easily download and run your game on their device. Really spoiled compared to Googles developer offering.
As I will be shifting to Unity with my next game, I will be very surprised if I release it on Android. I have lots of Android devices so let’s see if Unity’s optimization is good.
I fail to understand Google with all its money, are not able to create a simple developer console like Apple.
