Even the ever-popular Angry Birds – a game with simpler input and resource requirements – has had trouble in this area. Listing all supported devices in the application’s description in not a great nor a foolproof solution most users do or will not understand the lack of support for their device, leading to a lot of upset customers and reviews.
And while it’s easy to say we’ll “just support a few, modern phones” (like the Samsung Galaxy, the HTC Evo 4G, etc.), the Android Marketplace has little infrastructure to support this. On the subject of devices, I’d like to add that the huge variety of Android phones on the market is a daunting QA and support task. As such, when we do port Osmos, it will only be supported on recent phones and OS versions. It seems that only recently – with OS 2.1 and the latest wave of devices – has multitouch become a proper standard on Android phones. Sure, Android may run on your toaster someday, and that’s great – but will your toaster sport a multitouch screen? Regardless, there are already a ton of Android phones on the market that do not support multitouch, and even the OS has been rather half-baked with respect to its multitouch support. Multitouch: This may be a good time to point out that Android is an OS which extends beyond smart phones and tablets, and device standardization is a bit of a nightmare. None of these are actually blocking, but they do reduce the appeal of porting to Android, and will also limit the audience we’ll be able to reach. While that could be the end of the story, I think it’s worth pointing out some of our other considerations. We’re not sure when, but when it arrives, we’ll get started on the port. There is a light at the end of the tunnel however: we’ve heard rumours that OpenAL support is on Google’s roadmap. And since we are not willing to sacrifice the quality and richness of sound in Osmos – not to mention the extra work involved in migrating to a different library – we’re blocked. Surprisingly – especially for an OS based on Linux – Android does not yet support the OpenAL sound library! Osmos is strongly tied to OpenAL and makes extensive use of its pitch-shifting functionality, which most sound libraries (such as SDL) do not support. There are a number of reasons, but there’s only one that’s truly blocking us: OpenAL support. We’d like to, but after having spent some time and effort looking into it, we aren’t going to just yet.
After all, we’ve already ported it to iOS and Linux, so it should be a no-brainer, right? Well… unfortunately not. A lot of people have been asking us if and when we’ll bring Osmos to Android.
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