Hey all,
We went to the Yetizen "Android-i-fied" event and learned a ton about building games on Android, but if you happened to miss it, then we did a quick write up of what we learned. We put it below because we hoped that it would help you guys
Now, on to the event!
Charles Hudson kicked off the talk with some choice words:
ANDROID IS HARD!
Charles Hudson was not shy about his experiences building on the Android platform with his game studio, Bionic Panda Games. There was little sugar-coating of the six major challenges that Android developers face, especially when compared to iOS. He did have great suggestions for tackling each one, which we wanted to pass on to you. His six tips are below:
1. Fragmentation
Problem: Unlike the iPhone, there are many types of Android devices, which leads to OS fragmentation, varying screen size and resolutions, and types of hardware. This means that the user experience can vastly differ from user to user. Also, developers can drown themselves in work trying to make their game compatible with everything.
Solution: Charles suggests that you test your game on multiple devices to make sure the user experience can consistent across a sea of devices. He said that he bought old, “well loved” Android phones from resellers to cheaply test his game on each type of hardware. As for OS, if you need to draw a line in the sand and not supporting older OS versions to provide a consistent experience, then do so. According to Ngmoco, which spoke later in the evening, 94% of Android gamers are on 2.1 or above, so you won’t miss many customers by cutting out the troublesome 1.6 and 1.7 versions.
2. Development & Testing
Problem: Because it is so easy to launch new applications and versions on Android - you are essentially just one button away from pushing new versions - developers can sometimes get trigger happy. This can overwhelm users and stop them from updating your game.
Solution: Android users typically don’t update their apps as often as iOS users, so Charles recommended a minimum period of one week between app updates, excepting urgent bug fixes of course. And as we mentioned before, you should test your game on each major type of phone and supported OS version before an update goes live. This can prevent unforseen hiccups and help you avoid those urgent bug fixes.
3. Metrics
Problem: Developers are typically flying totally blind when it comes to the way that users are interacting with their app, especially on Android.
Solution: Look into integrating with an analytics platform that fits your budget. Google Analytics is free, but can be a trickier integration as it isn’t built for mobile. If you are looking for an easier and more mobile-friendly solution, there are mobile game analytics platforms that may be worth the cost such as Flurry and Localytics.
4. Platform Wars
Problem: 23% of all smartphone customers are on iOS devices, and conventional wisdom states that iOS users are more likely to pay for apps and complete in-app purchases than their Android counterparts.
Solution: To paraphrase Charles Hudson, “it is better to build a great game on one platform instead of a mediocre game on two platforms.” Each platform has different capabilities, so focus your resources in building an awesome game on one platform before you worry about iOS. Bionic Panda is an Android only game studio, so Charles clearly practices what he preaches.
5. Distribution & Discovery
Problem: Discoverability on Android depends less on category ranking compared to iOS, and getting Featured on the Android Market is just as difficult as it is on the Apple App Store. Also, Android does not have a united social graph like Facebook or Apple’s Game Center, so it is hard to lean on viral mechanics to acquire users.
Solution: There tends to be higher search activity on Android (as Charles pointed out, “it is Google product”), so make sure your app description is accurate and hits all of the important keywords that users would use to search for a game like yours. Also, he could not stress enough the importance of having a well-designed app icon that draws users in. This icon and your app title are often all the user sees before making his decision to download, so use that space wisely! Also, fortunately for Android developers, Android still allows incentivized installs, so jump on the ad networks such as Tapjoy and Admob to help capture your seed group of users. Assuming you’ve made a compelling app, once you get the seed group of users you should be off and running.
6. Monetization
Problem: It is conventional wisdom that iOS games typically generate more revenue when compared to Android games. Part of the story behind this is that in-app purchases on iOS is much easier than the severely fragmented Android payments.
Solution: Count on an eventual consolidation of payment methods on Android, and Google Payments is a good default because they will always be around. The key with monetization is to provide compelling reasons for users to buy in, and then they will find ways to do so, regardless of the difficulty.
Good day community,
Over the past several months, a few of us have been working on a projerct some may be familiar with. We have bundled an add-on to specific BlueStacks versions to allow for a complete Operating System environment, full of communications tools.
We didn't "develop", any of it. We have taken the time to scour the internet and primarily this site to garner the education, information and knowledge to actually bring it to fruition. We would like to say a big THANK YOU to the entire community here. We feel this is am important piece to a software life-cycle where developed information is compiled into a fully functioning system, exposing your people's craftsmanship.
The motive here is a moral one. I have been a communications engineer for 22 years and have seen and done things I thought weren't possible. I have been tasked with trying to develop an education platform technology matrix for schools. Specifically using my innovation abilities to solve problems. I am not a coder, I am more of a script writer. I have found success in making disparate hardware and software work together, and producing middle-ware scripts and functions to technologically solve challenges. In every sector.
I believe I have identified one of the major issues related to student success rates. Basic communications is hindered in many schools, internet cut out, and dictator like classroom regime. I feel communications is the king of industry and whomever has the information the fastest, cheapest, and accurate, wins. This is proven time and time again in capitalism. I feel students should be able to sms, or exchange pictures and peruse social networks, both to each other and their teachers. These are real-world tools, and the primary back-bone of a child's social life. But students need to learn to be accountable for they digital actions,
This "OS" changes things ever so slightly., not every student can afford the gear required to have that type of communication. If every kid could afford an iphone and ipad, than I don't need to do this project. Android on the other hand, little or no cost at all.
I will be deploying Android for Windows across the board. Students will have to setup a Google account and online storage. Copies of AW can be had for their home computer. The environment is the environment kids all love and use, the emulated touch interface is "cool" and the kids can support it and maintain it mostly themselves, and sync it to their PC phones or other devices, but those are NOT required. And no need to upgrade the PC's for a while, BlueStacks is Linux(ish), it's hardware demands are low, and I can keep the PC's at there current level.
I distribute it on thepratebay, another long story for another day, but this is the best way to ensure it stays out there, and the price is right to be able to push it out to the world. We have tirelessly worked to ensure compatibility with the apps the devs release and I know this particular release of AW has restored many of the items BlueStacks cripples
We have started a mini marketing campaign to drum up interest, although modest. And for you devs, this open an ENTIRE new revenue stream you didn't even have before. Making Android the primary OS used.
---------------------------
That's the agenda, I would like to open a support thread for it somewhere on here. I have an armada of info, tools, rootkits, tricks and troubleshooting information that we feel can be valuable to the community. I'll get things posted here ASAP. Anyone that has played with this at all before will be able to appreciate all of the challenges we had to solve.
We did not knowingly disassemble or modify any of the original distribution files of any applications, staying in accordance with about every license agreement on earth.
--------------------------
Looking for some feedback, questions, thoughts, ideas.. have to get 10 posts or something anyway...
Thank you to everyone!
-js
What's the difference between your project and the Android x86 project?
syung said:
What's the difference between your project and the Android x86 project?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
AFAIK Bluestacks has its own VM, so you doesn't need to install Virtual Machine any more.
I used this for a several months and it helps me to try an application without to send it to any Android device.
If you use Android x86 project, yo need to install it inside a Virtual Machine or make a USB Bootable, and as far I know it has limitations in the Play Store. Only some application that supports the architecture can be downloaded..
The Android x86 project is a piece of this absolutely. What BlueStacks is and what they have done is this:
Taken x86 gingerbread and ad an arm translator inside there. This is very unique, all of the other arm emulations fail out there after you even try to put them to the test with heavier use or apps. Basically the compatibility is just not there.
BlueStacks then added the vm player which is the most sophisticated player there is. Network mounts to shared fordler without installing drivers, and opengl support for limited HD graphics.
What we did
BlueStacks also crippled the hell out of the original ROM. All kinds of things missing that had to be put back in piece by piece, and still ensure compatibility. Some things fine to leave out, other maybe useful.
poring over the information, rooting bluestacks came easy, so we rooted every single v7.x of bluestacks, and began the mountain task of building compatibility. The winners are 7.4 for SD and 7.8 for HD. 7.8 handle the interface scrolling operations WAY better than later revisions. I can tell it was after this rev they forced on Surface Pro support, not back checking compatibility. And 7.4 installs on any machine but drops the arm translator. Still a nice product to put on an old machine, but little support for modern apps, and there won't be
Then doing a fair assessment of applications to do all the tasks one needs, file manipulation, printing, music, calling etc, We've spent over 200 hours trying to get a reliable lock screen, failed on that But we got most of it.
Finally adding and getting gapps to fully function was about like trying to drink a beer while standing on your head, it was like a marathon game of whack mole, we'd fix something, then something else friggen slam us over the head. Then we got to writing script, and adding widows apps like virtual keyboards and mouse to basically be able to run the entire OS with 1 finger as if you were Stephen Hawking.
We had an excellent response to the initial concept stuff version 1.1. It held on to around 400 seeders and 1000 user swam for about a week then began to fizzle. We expect that to triple and estimate 100,000 downloads in the first week. It is my opinion thepiratebay is the most accurate source for demand of anything digital, people that keep a copy and seed, actually really like something, versus an artificial "like" that other sites have and profit from. That's all Trip9d0zen stuff, about removing fake values and replacing it with real information exchange freedoms, so actually all financial can get to a creator, don't want to digress to far in this thread, but there is an ideology we have in common with thee twitters and thepitatebay's who have just the extreme basics of censorship, only to ensure safety, but never manipulated the information. We have evidence and models to change current businesses, and put the devs out in-front of these projects (or the artist selected agents). The more systems Android runs on, more success one can have. And Windows being the biggest, hands down, why not?
We feel this is by far the most compatible Android environment one can use, and can actually be used by anyone as an effective tool.
We know full well that once released, the ungodly amount of app work requests will be at its highest, but that's why I am here, where the devs are.. is this a revenue stream they want to suppport,?
I am personally using it exclusively for all my communications, social media and document creation, I only use windows for video playing files.
Hope that helps answer, here is the info to commercials for it, as our lil-1337s eloquently cranked out, smartasses...
youtube search for js99912
-js
It looks interesting, i'll check that up!
Dexcellium said:
It looks interesting, i'll check that up!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Me too. Thanks
Android for Windows 2.0
new version just went live..... can someone reply with a hot-link, thanks
thepiratebay.sx
/torrent/8440340
Adding Game Data / Mount SDcard.sparse BlueStacks
Ok, I have been asked about this more than anything,
Used to be the SDcard was a .fs file and could be manipulated easy, now it's a bit more involved, but none to difficult.
You need to download:
thepiratebay.sx/
torrent/8453985
This will get you to be able to mount the SDcard.sparsefs as a drive letter in windows... Nothing new, just consolidating info as I have been requested for this more than anything else. Enjoy!
-js
I have an HTML 5 app built with Sencha Touch + Cordova. The app works ok and is already in production, but I want more in terms of performance for the future, so I'm thinking about rewriting it in another framework.
On propertycross.com some of the most used cross-platform frameworks have been compared... I went through all of them and for me the winner is with no doubt NeoMAD. The approach seems the right one: write in one language (Java) and have the native app generated for each platform.
I saw no difference in terms of performance between the native one and the one built with NeoMAD, also the app was only a bit larger (1.2mb the native one, 1.9mb the one built with NeoMAD), with Titanium and Xamarin I get an app 10 times bigger, not to mention the increased startup time.
By doing some research on the web though, NeoMAD doesn't seem much used... on stackoverflow I get only 5 questions with the neomad tag.
So why so few people use this framework? Seems to me the perfect one... Does anyone have any experience with it?
Hello Emanuele,
First of all, as one of the NeoMAD founders I was very happy to read your post!
To answer your question, I think there are 3 explanations:
1/ NeoMAD is available on the market since 2012 only and this is a first objective reason why we do not have a lot of users at the moment.
2/ Neomades is a small company with limited marketing resources compared to our main competitors.
3/ The Neomades team is mainly a tech one and we have not been so efficient until now in business dev.
However, NeoMAD is used for mobile developments by major french organizations such as CROUS, L'Oréal and TNS Sofres / WPP Group. Some of these applications are available on the app stores, you can find more information about it in the References section of our website.
We hope that comments like yours will catch the community's attention and increase the visibility of NeoMAD… without users and the developer community we will not succeed !
Fill free to contact us for any questions a [email protected]
Best regards.
Hey @memanuele
First of all, you need to choose the framework according to your specific project needs. It's really hard to name the one-fits-all framework. If you're in no hurry, you can spend some time trying different ones and thus deciding what will be the best variant for you.
If you don't have time, you can get initial information from the blogs, for example, here or here, to name a few. Google it, there's alot of interesting going on.
Edit: Ddamn, just noticed the date of the initial post...
Hello guys!
I am new to this world completely! So please forgive my naive questions if they sound as such.
I was having a debate with an instructor of mine about iOS vs Android, and as I started criticizing Android for its fragmentation problem, my instructor started defending Android in that Android's latest move towards pushing an updated API to most of its user-base could very well negate the shortcomings of its firmware (OS) varieties. The main reason for this debate was me stating that if Apple decides to compete against google in advertising, it may reach almost all of its users through an 'unchallengeable' advantage as almost all of them run on the same OS, whereas if Android were to similarly display it ads on built-in apps as well as external apps provided by developers in Android's Appstore (ads provided by these two companies not developers, and pushed via developer-app by purchasing ad-space within their apps), Android wont be able to reach its users as iOS due to fragmentation. He ended up challenging me: if I find him a way in which iOS' firmware would create a barrier against Android's API, he'd give me 10 bonus points at the end of the semester, and if I fail, he'll cut 10 points from my final result!! Question, therefore, is: if these two giants decide to dog-fight in advertising, how could Apple exploit Android's fragmentation issue despite Android's API which could reach its old and new firmwares?
Kindly know that none of us are developers as we both specialize in business. We just happen to have huge interest in tech, especially in Apple vs Google, iOS vs Android!
Despite my lack of technical knowledge, I accepted the challenge because its sounds rather counter-intuitive, to me, that Android's API wouldn't be tackled if Apple decides to play dirty through its OS-unified (almost) user base. Why go through the hassle of overhauling the firmware if a simple fix as API could bridge the gap?!
A solution with very thorough explanation would be very much welcome and appreciated!
Thanks in advance.
Dear users of xda developers
Within the context of a research project by the Institute of Technology and Innovation Management at the Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, we are investigating the potential of online communities as an instrument for the prediction of future developments and trends. We are planning to execute an “idea contest” which separates in four phases. We have no financial interests in the ideas. We are only interested how online communities discuss about the future.
THE PROCEDURE
First phase
How will open source software and operating systems look like in the year 2030?
This phase is a brainstorming of the future development open source software and operating systems.
The ideas and concepts should be posted within this thread and be discussed with other users. It doesn’t matter how detailed the concepts or ideas are. There is no right or wrong. Every idea and concept, regardless how farfetched or ‘exaggerated’ will be considered.
Time period for this round: 14 days.
We are looking forward to your discussions!
If you have any questions, just write here in the thread or contact us. We will guide you through the contest!
And now let’s start with phase 1!
@Zeng1987 & @Gideon92
___
@svetius approved
Hey folks, we,
@Zeng1987 and myself, are very eager to hear your ideas and concepts how open soruce software and operating systems look like in 2030!
Best regards,
@Gideon92
Cloud Computing
Hey Guys,
This sounds quite interesting.
I think cloud computing will play an important role for the future and will replace external storages.
In my company everthing is saved and stored in a cloud.
What do you guys think?
---
Qwertz92