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by extension 5333 days ago
I can understand how anything other than instant gratification from a mobile game would justify a bad review. This is bite-sized software. Most games only provide 30-60 minutes of entertainment anyway. If it takes that long just to get it running, you've pretty much blown it.

I'm a mobile game dev and I don't like it either, but I understand why it's right for users. We've gotta give them a seamless experience, like a restaurant. Yeah, if there's a fly in your soup you can no doubt send it back and get another one, but the damage is done.

1 comments

I'm a professional game developer who's jumped into indie/mobile. The problems people with my game are having are not (in general) things not working -- there are tutorials, and it's in the Angry Birds genre, so people know how to play it pretty quickly. I just got picked up by a major publisher (hint: they've had the #1 revenue app on iOS for a large percentage of the last two months...), so I'm not the only one who thinks my game is fit to run in the big leagues.

One problem is occasionally buggy devices or firmware. I have one crash where a WebView is dying trying to display an ad, and while the ad is possibly conflicting with the WebView, I'm not sure how to FIX that, since the ad being provided isn't under my control (aside from choosing another ad provider).

And don't get me started on Samsung and the SoundPool class. It will just lock up your Samsung device to USE a SoundPool on it in a game. But only intermittently. Sigh.

When the problem is they don't like ads -- well, it's a free game, and there aren't words I'm willing to use on HN that are sufficient to describe what I think of those...individuals.