How Do Top Android Developers QA Test Their Apps? A couple weeks ago I ran this post showing how one Hong Kong developer, Animoca, tests its Android games. The company, which has had more than 70 million downloads, tests every one of their apps on about 400 different devices. The photo above is from their headquarters and is just a taste of all the Android phones and tablets they use.
Needless to say, that post pissed Android supporters off. Some commenters said it intimidated would-be developers, who might get scared off by Android fragmentation and the perception that you have to support hundreds of devices, screen sizes and densities and versions of the OS. So, I asked around to see how other mobile game developers do quality assurance testing for Android. This is what I got: Red Robot Labs: (Backed by Benchmark Capital. Red Robot uses about 12 devices in-house and has a quality assurance team of two people. “Saying no to players with small, poor, outdated phones or old OSs is important too,” he says. Pocket Gems Android QA Process. Angry Birds spotlights Android fragmentation - CNET Mobile. The good news for Android is that it's flexible enough to reach many corners of the smartphone market. The bad news is that this can mean headaches for programmers--as the top-ranked game Angry Birds illustrated today. Angry Birds developer Rovio Mobile has announced that it's going to create a second version of its flagship game for lower-end Android devices after finding "severe performance issues.
" "With our latest update, we worked hard to bring Angry Birds to even more Android devices. Despite our efforts, we were unsuccessful in delivering optimal performance," the Angry Birds developer team said today in the blog post. In the Android-vs. In October, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs lambasted Android for inflicting a "daunting challenge" on developers who must reckon with the "very, very fragmented" Android environment. TweetDeck's leader bridled at Jobs' characterization , though, indicating that at least for some Android's variety isn't a big problem. Zipline CEO: Stop whining about Android fragmentation and do some damn QA!
After reading last week’s Next Web article on the ‘toll’ of Android fragmentation, I’ve had my fill of horror stories about Android support. I thought I’d set the record straight, based on Zipline’s experience with Wolf Toss, a game that we released to Android and iOS on the same day and has been a Top 20 title on both platforms. Let’s roll back the clock. In 2011, I really believed the fragmentation issue was going to be a big deal for us. We’d spent most of the year beta testing our Moai game development platform, which had its first high profile iOS launch in September with Crimson: Steam Pirates. In January, Wolf Toss was featured on Android Market, and shot up to a million users in a week, with over five hundred different Android device types.
The team and I spent long evenings and every weekend testing on each Android device we identified as having an issue. Guess what we found after weeks of testing? Excerpts. 5 Lessons from a Successful Multi-platform Game Launch | Blog. Details Category: Blog Published on Wednesday, 21 March 2012 15:27 It's been a busy January at Zipline Games. In addition to the Moai platform and community growing by leaps and bounds as we get close to our 1.0 launch, our in-house title Wolf Toss now has over 1 million players and a 4.5 star user review average across Android, iOS, and the Chrome Web Store.
Lesson #5: Device proliferation is real, and it will keep you up at night. When you’re launching a game for iOS, you have to decide how many versions of the hardware and iOS system software you’re going to support. All in all, iOS is reasonably tractable. Mitigate the situation as best you can. Lesson #4: Letterboxing may be standard for movies, but it’s not good for mobile games Multi-platform games have to support a lot of resolutions and aspect ratios. But by optimizing for the 3:2 displays, QHD Android users got small black bars on either end of their screens and they were not happy!
Lesson #3: App piracy - get used to it. - Todd. Mobile Application Testing on Real Devices - Perfecto Mobile. Android (OS): Is there a platform for app development that solves for fragmentation problem across Android devices. Android Is Fragmented. How to Deal With it. « Elia Insider. Back in January I proposed a hypothesis that, as a developer, we no longer consider writing for an operating system. Instead, we focus on writing for a device family. For instance, you don’t write for Android. You write for Samsung phones that use Android. I’m seeing more momentum in this direction. The first was a story sent to me by a friend entitled “The shocking toll of hardware and software fragmentation on Android development.”
In short, developer David Smith released AudioBooks, a free app, into the Android market. With 1.3 million downloads it has been run on 1,443 different Android devices. As I said in January, with Samsung owning huge market share among smartphones, does it make sense to develop for other Android smartphones? Charlie Kindel also wrote an interesting article on Google and what he believes is its Android strategy. Google will start distancing itself from the Android brand completely. Android and its Fragmentation. For many app developers android fragmentation could be a real pain. Theoretically app written on one version of android should run on same version and forward. And, that include all different brand and model. But for many cases this is not right. There are so many situations where app written on one version crashes on another.
This thing gets critical when app crashes on same Android version but on different brands and some time on same brands but on different models. Yep! This can happen, on same Android build/version/SDK. I spent quite some time in mobile start-up at Midtown Manhattan. Theoretically fragmentation affects “write once run anywhere” functionality. Changes on Software/Operating System is one good reason for fragmentation. Localization is one big reason for fragmentation. Writing defensive coding is a very good way to deal with fragmentation.
On Android manifest file you can provide hardware configuration to limit the user viewing capabilities.