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Mika Mobile ends Android development

mikamobile.blogspot.com

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Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#11

Post by beatle »

sawyer wrote: post #9

For those who may not know, and because it's not mentioned in the blog post, Mika Mobile develops their games in Unity. It's a testament to the challenge of developing games to work on all Android devices that even with Unity's support they still have to spend so much development effort on shaders and debugging device specific issues.

what are these people complaining about?

Google didn't release Android to give the users the best possible product, service and user experience. They released Android so they can serve ads.

An ad company will never give a shit about user experience.

I knew this the minute Google bought Android. It took them these long to figure to this out.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#12

Post by masklinn »

MattRogish wrote: post #4

I work for an app company and can verify his comments. Apple has done a great job at getting its users to pay for apps. They've done this via: 1) Encouraging Developers to not price free apps (this happens sometimes in review, in their literature, etc.) 2) Capturing device owner's credit card info at the start (so buying an app is frictionless) 3) Removing low-quality, buggy, copycat, and junk apps from the store via…

> 2) Capturing device owner's credit card info at the start (so buying an app is frictionless)

Don't forget the pretty popular iTunes gift cards, either as gifts from third parties or to replace a CC.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#13

Post by pragmatic »

Too bad. My 5 year old son loves Battleheart.

I _bought_ it for the Kindle Fire. It's actually my son's preferred gaming platform (compared to Wii, 3ds and Leapster Explorer) probably because the game are so accessible/easy to use.

I've often considered getting into game development on the android. However, it doesn't look like a profitable venture.

If the makers of a fantastic (highly rated, almost 5 stars on the amazon app store) game aren't making money on the Android platform...what hope is there for the rest of us.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#14

Post by andylei »

jrockway wrote: post #2

Seems fine to me. No money being made, no money to pay for development. I don't blame this on Android phones or users, however. (Bandwidth is, sadly, becoming a big issue these days, because nobody offers unlimited plans anymore. 5GB per month means one max-size app and maybe a few text messages before you start paying one billion dollars per nanobyte in overages. It's like 1980s long distance all over again.)

> I don't blame this on Android phones or users,

who exactly would you blame?

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#15

Post by Jaecen »

Perhaps Mika Mobile's problem is that they are trying to provide support like a large company without the resources to do so. I certainly applaud their effort, but would it have been more economical to simply tell people that they can give a refund and that's it?

It seems a shame that they're giving up their position in the Android market and abandoning some hard-won experience.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#16

Post by Steko »

andylei wrote: post #14
jrockway wrote: post #2

Seems fine to me. No money being made, no money to pay for development. I don't blame this on Android phones or users, however. (Bandwidth is, sadly, becoming a big issue these days, because nobody offers unlimited plans anymore. 5GB per month means one max-size app and maybe a few text messages before you start paying one billion dollars per nanobyte in overages. It's like 1980s long distance all over again.)

> I don't blame this on Android phones or users, who exactly would you blame?

Cross out phones (which I read as phone makers not "android") and users and you have Google left.

Which makes sense since many of the cited disadvantages ultimately lie with Android and Marketplace implementation decisions made by Google.

I'm not sure Andy Rubin would disagree much either but what he might say candidly is Google takes the long view. And the long view is that Google Play today is far ahead of the Marketplace two years ago and in 2 years it will be ahead of where they are now by an even larger margin. And the same thing with development tools. And the userbase advantage will be even larger.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#17

Post by keeperofdakeys »

Google wants the Android platform to move away from SD Cards, their Nexus series really shows this. The Nexus S, their second Nexus phone, had no SD card. However, due to the requirements of a separate filesystem for USB Mass Storage, they partitioned the internal storage into two.

Then you get the Galaxy Nexus, with only one partition. It features Ice Cream Sandwich, with MTP (Mass Transport Protocol). MTP allows access to a filesystem without unmounting it, so the phone can continue to use the filesystem. The only real disadvantage of MTP is that OSX and Linux support is limited, since it is developed by Microsoft. It should also be said that ICS still supports USB Mass Storage, but the Galaxy Nexus cannot.

The Asus Transformer also does this, using a large internal storage with no SD card. More phones might switch to this model, but for now the SD card is not going away.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#18

Post by bgramer »

RandallBrown wrote: post #6
jrockway wrote: post #2

Seems fine to me. No money being made, no money to pay for development. I don't blame this on Android phones or users, however. (Bandwidth is, sadly, becoming a big issue these days, because nobody offers unlimited plans anymore. 5GB per month means one max-size app and maybe a few text messages before you start paying one billion dollars per nanobyte in overages. It's like 1980s long distance all over again.)

Apple caps 3g app downloads at 30mb I think. Any bigger than that and you need to use wifi or sync via iTunes. It would be nice if Google would implement something like this for Android. I didn't even know about this limitation until today ( I'm an iPhone user/developer).

Actually, that's 20mb, but I'm pretty sure this went up to 50mb with the new iOS 5.1 update.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#19

Post by zmmmmm »

I wish Google would take the problems of cross phone compatibility more seriously. Without it the entire purpose of Android is compromised, and yet, they don't seem to put much effort into ensuring compatibility or motivating manufacturers to ensure it.

For example, while I support Google's decision to keep the Android market open, I don't see why apps that simply crash upon launch should be allowed allowed to be sold and downloaded to people's phones. Google can easily detect / track this kind of thing and automatically flag phones not supported as incompatible, refund users and notify the developers. On the developers side, they should have access to an extensive database of compatibility information so that manufacturers are shamed into seeing devices that are hard to support getting black banned in the market and crossed off support lists by developers.

I don't think you need an authoritarian approach like Apple's to make things better, but you need to do more than Google is right now.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#20

Post by cageface »

I've been doing iOS dev for a while now and I'm considering expanding to Android as well but stories like this give me pause. I guess I've been spoiled by an environment that's homogeneous enough that I don't have to worry about things like GL shaders mysteriously failing on some devices etc.

Can more experienced devs comment on how common these kinds of problems are in practice? If I do some Android ports for my clients do I really need to buy 10+ devices and debug on each of them?

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