Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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professionals billing $150 per hour still insist on attempting to conduct highly security sensitive work on extremely outdated devices.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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com