Very sad result from Mika Mobile:
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. 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.
Battleheart is a great wee game; I’ve played it through and the kids love it too.
The main problems here are not the lack of money being spent on their game by customers but the overheads of supporting dozens of different configurations and the daft limitations imposed by Android on app sizes on internal storage. This was an issue a couple of years ago but I was under the impression that things have improved. Of course – most Android devices are not on recent versions of the operating system and, in fact, you have no idea of knowing what operating system you’re trying to target.
The blame here is squarely with Google. Their solution is “buy a new device”. That’s not a good enough answer.
When companies have more money than god, there is a certain level of support that you should expect. For instance, Microsoft has done well over the years with some flagship releases of their operating systems (Win95/98, Win2K/XP, Win7) and Apple has traditionally had great success in getting decent adoption of their software (75% of the iOS market are on iOS 5). Google has less than 4% penetration of their latest release and I can’t find a phone sold here that actually comes installed with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4). Everything sold by Apple will have iOS5.
Google is to blame here and Android just lost a great developer that went over and beyond the call of duty.