We spent a few days making a free version of snowboarding for android, released it, and got a bunch of complaints that it doesn't work on certain phones. So I fixed the problems and released a newer version called B.M.Snowboard Free. Sales are up and so is ad income. I don't know if either will last very long.
Hardware fragmentation:
We now run on all major 2.0 android phones. The way this was accomplished was to go into AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint stores and install the free version on a bunch of phones for testing. I had to actually buy a Hero which I will be returning in order to get that one working.
There were 4 issues I found:
* Sound - some phones really hate starting/stopping sounds. I had to remove some sound effects to get the blazing fast Samsung Galaxy S phones to work.
* Mipmap generation - The Hero can't generate mipmaps with an openGL code. I had to manually create the mips.
* glGetFloatv - This function does not exist on the Hero. I had to redo some camera code.
* Holy crap some of those old phones are crappy. The Hero has even worse benchmarks than the iPhone 1.
Return rate:
I may have misquoted the numbers. I looked at total installs vs active installs. This tells me how many people still have it installed, but it doesn't tell me how many of those people ended up not paying for it. With better compatibility and a demo version we're getting about a 15% return rate.
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