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Comment by krutzger | Hacker News Reader

Finally created an account, just to say this

"A Dark Room recently hit the #2 spot _overall_ on Google Play (pro tip: stick to iOS, the revenue is almost an order of magnitude better)"

I bought the game on android to support the developer despite the game being VERY late to android. With that said, the android port is horrible. It's behind garbage. Amir cannot talk about love for the code and release crap like that.

So treating android user as idiots. We pay for good game and avoid crap. Don't be crap.

Edit: ADR went quickly free on android because nobody would pay for that crap. So that's why it didn't make much money.

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That sucks. I’d spend more time on the Android version. But there is a really high piracy rate. Buy a Samsung Galaxy S8, it was tested on there.

Both Michael and I appreciate the hat tip you gave us by buying it. Email me and I’ll glady refund your $0.99.

My 2 cents:

1. Charge more than 99c. Double the price and your sales will likely drop by less than half, making it profitable to do so.

2. If you’re going to half-ass the port to Android, why even bother? It will do more damage than it’s worth.

It works great on the devices I’ve tested on. Which is like 4 out of the 15,000 possible OS+Device+Carrier combinations.

If it looks like a half-loaded web page on a nexus (which is the reference device for the platform) then something is wrong.

Please don't take offence, I'm just trying to explain why it did so bad on android.

edit: you don't need to test your app on 1500 devices. They are all the same, if you plan for it only two devices (big/small screen) should suffice. Source: former app developer.

You’d be surprised at how many variations exist out there. Source: app developer who has had 300k downloads of his Android port and has dealt with death threats from people trying to run his game on a device that has the processing power of a toaster.

I can feel your pain. I get aggressive complaints from my users when their 5 year old Android can’t use modern video codecs because they can’t upgrade the OS. Somehow that’s my fault. (This is for secure video chat FWIW.) With iOS, it’s a simple as ensuring their OS is current. Far, far less pain dealing with iOS and Mac users than anything with Android. That isn’t a complaint against Android per se — just a business fact. Android users quite simply cost us more money in support and development time, not to mention Android users generally are more “value conscious” which is another way of saying “cheap.” We have a HIPPA compliant video system and it’s amazing that mental health professionals billing $150 per hour still insist on attempting to conduct highly security sensitive work on extremely outdated devices. I can only imagine how it must be to deal with casual gamers without any professional motivation.

I think ADR with its simplistic graphics should run on any android (even a "toaster").

But your app seems more demanding, can't you limit it to newer versions of android? Many banking apps for example require users to be on 6.0 or better.

Are you sure that's not just what the game is supposed to look like?

Nope, the iOS version looks different (e.g. buttons on main page are not off center)

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