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Mika Mobile ends Android development

mikamobile.blogspot.com

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Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#21

Post by protomyth »

masklinn wrote: post #12
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.

That is a huge bonus for a lot of teenagers. Pay cash at Wal-Mart for an iTunes card so you can buy stuff from the app store.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#22

Post by eropple »

Jaecen wrote: post #15

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.

What market? Virtually nobody making Android games is making money, especially compared to iOS versions. It's exceedingly grim.

"We make 5% of our revenue from Android" is not exactly an outlier.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#23

Post by funkah »

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).

It doesn't sound like the limit is because of wireless data, but because of the way Android devices download apps.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#24

Post by methodin »

beatle wrote: post #11
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.

What the hell are you talking about? Aside from admob integration on games that developers add themselves, what ads are you seeing on the platform outside of websites?

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#25

Post by methodin »

If only people spent as much time working on a decent platform like Andengine (which works on most devices with little effort) instead of porting ios code and ending up with apps that only work on devices they were tested on (or complained from).

It makes sense they have to deal with problems all the time since they clearly don't have a thorough understanding of the Android platform itself and what it takes to actually support the range of devices. Buying $1,000+ of test hardware will also not fix your problem if the problem is not doing things properly. You certainly won't get it by patching ios-based code every time a customer complains.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#26

Post by nivertech »

dagw wrote: post #10
RandallBrown wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Android App store warns you that you are about to start a large download via 3G and asks if you're sure you want to do so. Personally I find that a much better approach. Apple doesn't know the details of my contract and if I want to download 70 (or 170)MB over 3G, surely that's my prerogative and why should my phone stop me?

I have unlimited 3G data plan on my iPad and it always hated that Apple won't let me update some apps until I'm near WiFi spot... until I bought Galaxy Nexus inserted SIM from my phone with limited data plan and it exceeded my capped data plan in the first hour (OS updates).

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#27

Post by cageface »

methodin wrote: post #25

If only people spent as much time working on a decent platform like Andengine (which works on most devices with little effort) instead of porting ios code and ending up with apps that only work on devices they were tested on (or complained from). It makes sense they have to deal with problems all the time since they clearly don't have a thorough understanding of the Android platform itself and what it takes to actual…

How do you anticipate problems like buggy GL drivers with inconsistent shader implementations? At the rate new devices are coming out it seems impossible for any framework to cover them all.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#28

Post by ernesth »

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.)

> nanobyte

Ho! They exist! Does it mean that apps on the android market are limited to 50 millibits as the article says?

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#29

Post by baconner »

cageface wrote: post #20

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 cli…

Your instincts are correct here I think. If you're writing games then I suspect this is pretty accurate. You'd likely have to purchase a lot of test devices and do a lot of tuning to keep up with the hardware. Android vs. iOS game dev strikes me as a lot like the difference between windows and console game development.

If, however, you're writing basic apps like I am and using the standard development tools then it's a lot less of a hassle. I primarily write appwidgets (apps that run on the home screen). Theoretically these have could run into more fragmentation issues since various manufacturers have built their own home screen replacements and improved appwidget capabilities have been a focus in 3.x, 4.x. Yet in about 2 years since I started I've rarely hit a device specific issue and I'm supporting 2.1 - 4.x. I have about 3000 active users so not exactly large scale, but enough that if it were a serious issue I think I'd be hearing about it more.

I have two devices - a nexus one to test on 2.x/phone and a transformer prime to test on 4.x/tablet. Other versions I spot test in the emulator (admittedly this is awful). That's been sufficient for me.

I'm sympathetic to the technical difficulties of developing and maintaining a high quality game for the platform, but that shouldn't scare anyone off from developing regular apps.

Re: Mika Mobile ends Android development

#30

Post by cageface »

baconner wrote: post #29
cageface wrote: post #20

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 cli…

Your instincts are correct here I think. If you're writing games then I suspect this is pretty accurate. You'd likely have to purchase a lot of test devices and do a lot of tuning to keep up with the hardware. Android vs. iOS game dev strikes me as a lot like the difference between windows and console game development. If, however, you're writing basic apps like I am and using the standard development tools then it's…

Interesting. The apps my clients have asked me to write so far are pretty straightforward so maybe I could also get by with only a few devices. I'm certainly not doing anything that pushes the hardware as hard as a game.
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