Mika Mobile, the company behind popular mobile games like Battleheart and Zombieville USA, will no longer be supporting Android.
The problem, according to the company, is not the actual process of developing a game for Android, but rather the unending maintenance that comes with it.
In an official blog post, the company wrote, “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.”
Time is valuable, and Mika Mobile questioned whether or not that was the best use of its time. “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,” the developer said.
“These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.”
When it comes to simple apps, Android is a great platform. Android developers really enjoy making apps just for the satisfaction of seeing people download it. But the majority of people who build an iPhone app, meanwhile, expect to make money from it. As a result, apps like subway maps or RSS feed services are more likely to be free on Android than in the App Store.
But on the flip side, apps that actually have an incredible amount of content (that is to say, apps that are actually worth paying for) are more common on the iPhone and iPad platform.
