Battleheart Developer Dropping Android?

In the middle of addressing the supposed lifting of the app download size limit Mika Mobile addressed the state of their current app offerings and the return they are seeing on their extra attention they have to pay to the Android platform.  The results aren’t pretty.

“…as I mentioned on Twitter, our Android apps aren’t making money.  A few people took offense to the bluntness of this statement, so I’ll clarify in more delicate terms.  There’s a big difference between generating revenue, and "making money" – It’s not that they haven’t generated income, but that income is offset by the additional support costs the platform has demanded.  Where did your dollar go?  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.  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.  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.

From a purely economic perspective, I can no longer legitimize spending time on Android apps, and the new features of the market do nothing to change this.  While this news may be disappointing, I hope people can accept that we’ve done everything we can reasonably do to bring our apps to as many potential players as possible, despite the obstacles.”

So it seems like the true terror of fragmentation is the cost and attention developers have to contend with maybe on equal footing with exposure. As time rolls along this will continue to be one of the biggest pluses for devs to prioritize Apple’s iOS over competing platforms. Choice is always good but as a dev is migraine inducing.

If you’d like to check out what the game has to offer hit the link: Battleheart

Source: Mika Mobile