Complexities of Android development

As an indie mobile developer, I can personally attest that making things on Android - especially games - is pretty difficult.

I ran across this article about Battleheart's developer basically giving up on the Android platform as being "unsustainable" (original blog post by the developer here).

Now, this person has quite a lot of good points that works against Android devices in the business sense.  Why would you want to support something that takes a vast disproportionate amount of money to create?

Android has lots of problems for developers, and one of which is that simply Android users are generally more frugal with buying things (to include newer devices).  This means that as a developer, we should cater to old technology because a decent segment of the Android market are using old devices.

For example, I attempt to target Android 1.5 devices when and where possible so that, in theory, all newer devices should be able to run our games.  That sounds good at first, but this isn't always the reality, and this is where Battleheart's developer has a good point.  The only sure-fire way to guarantee that apps will work on a device is to physically test it on that device.

I wish it was an easy case were we can just load up our apps in an emulator, test, fix, deploy, but it definitely isn't that simple.  Each device manufacturer seems to have implemented various things about Android in their own way; forcing developers to cater to each device maker!

For example, only Android 2.1 allows for multitouch.  We created a virtual Dpad app that accepts user input on a circle (simulated analog dpad if you will) along with 2 virtual "buttons" - think like a Nintendo controller, but with a virtual directional pad.

After several days of developing and testing, it works 100% on our Motorola RAZR, but breaks horribly on Samsung Galaxy Tablet... and it all came down to the fact that Samsung implemented multitouch differently than Motorola (Motorola seemingly did it in accordance with the Android dev specs... Samsung apparently didn't?!).  As a developer, there would be no way for me to know this unless I physically had both of these devices... and this is a major problem with deploying games/apps on Android without having hundreds/thousands of Android devices to test against.  As a small indie shop, this means very unlikely to fork up all this cash for devices just to get meager amounts of downloads in Google Play market.

I can definitely feel what Mika Mobile is talking about as we've run in to these barriers as well.  It isn't impossible, but it sure raises the bar for "quality" (ie, not crashing/breaking) apps to have widespread deployment on the Android platform.