Not my insight, but one of the more informative comments I saw in the article Slashdot linked to on this topic (<a href="http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/03/10/mika.mobile.says.android.money.losing.platform/" rel="nofollow">http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/03/10/mika.mobile.sa...</a>):<p><i>I completely support your decision to drop Android like a hot potato.<p>In the two weeks since starting as a senior graphics engineer at a middleware company who shall remain nameless, I have learned from coworkers about, or personally experienced:<p>- Drivers that crash if you try to actually use all of the texture formats they claim to support
- Drivers that crash if you try to actually use certain ARBs that they report as supported
- Drivers that report supporting 128 shader uniforms but crash if you try to access anything past the first 64
- Drivers that report supporting various OpenGL ARBs but actually have a software path<p>in fact, I don't believe there has been a single Android device that has come out so far that is </i>actually <i>point-for-point compliant with the requirements for OpenGL ES 2.0, yet they have no problems claiming to support it nowadays.<p>GPU support on Android is utterly atrocious, and I've managed to learn this in all of two weeks at my new job.</i><p>As someone that's on the verge of porting some 3D code to OpenGL ES 2.0, this is awfully depressing. :(
There seems to be a market for some kind of game framework for Android. Game developers shouldn't have to spend effort on specializing in Android hardware support.<p><i>"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."</i><p>I think we could get an economy of scale if someone who enjoyed this kind of work would supply a useful platform for game devs.
I'm always surprised when blog authors are talking about a product and they don't include any links at all to that product.<p>I'm not asking for huge banners or marquee scrolling, just a plain simple text link on first mention.
One of the main reasons i haven't really gotten into Android development is i really don't know what i am targeting.<p>I think if there was some sort of standardised tier system for categorizing hardware capabilities (e.g. tier 1 = basic, tier 2 = supports 3d, tier 3 = quad core powerhouse), it would help immensely.
I think the most notable part of this story is the...notability....of it. There are literally tens of thousands of developers on the Android market -- including many long time denizens -- but one (purportedly) quits and it gets spread far and wide: I've now seen this linked on a number of blogs, news sites, and social news lists.<p>Why? I would argue that it speaks to an audience's bias.<p>I think the most interesting thing about this company is that their games are, by most respects, quite successful on the Android market. A $3.00 game selling more than 50,000 copies. Another selling 100,000+. Another selling 100,000+. Perhaps they got all of their sales during a sale, but their base metrics seem quite good.<p>I can't speak to their situation or frustration, but will make a couple of remarks for prospective Android devs-<p>a) Cut out the crap: Don't desperately try to reach 100% of the Android base because that just sets you up for a world of pain, which I suspect is their core issue. Cut out low-end handsets, with the basest filter being Gingerbread+ at this point.<p>b) There are actually only a handful of GPUs in use across all of the different devices (Adreno, PowerVR, Tegra2/3, Mali). Understand the GPUs, not the handsets.<p>c) If you can't handle the work, which apparently this company couldn't, <i>subcontract</i>. They apparently had a successful product but they couldn't tolerate the work involved. I guarantee that if they offered it out for profit sharing to a contractor they would have many well-rated prospects.