App Launchpad

We have silently rolled out our first Google G1 Android platform application today.

It is actually a game, yet another implementation of famous addictive ball game, called SameGame. We chose it as our pilot project for Android because it has its own fans already, there were no implementation of this game for Android when we started (2 appeared while we have been in development), and foremost – we like the game ourselves.

The game differs from the counterparts with pretty good graphics, error-free implementation, high score integration, redo-undo functions, etc. It asks the permission to get access to smarphone’s call state – so that you may safely return to the game after unexpected incoming call, it asks for internet access and geolocation coordinates so that we can show off your high score globally and locally.

We had a lot of fun developing for a new for us platform, all the way through. Perhaps, the most tricky issue turned out to be the geolocation coordinates.  We did not want to ask user a permission and make him wait until his current coordinates will be calculated, and therefore we used last known location instead. It was confusing though as Android (like iPhone) can check the location over wireless as well over GPS and sometimes last known location is not what one would have expected . The other issue we spent quite a bit of time on was to trigger the proper handlers once the phone wakes up of the standby state. Not that we were preparing to get users asleep while playing this game, but did do the handlers just in case one only plays at the red traffic lights (like I did while testing the game).

The other important business lesson we learned – if you want to do something, start it as soon as possible so that you do not regret should rivals do it faster.

Android market was amazing – we have been able to upload our game just under 5 minutes of time. Quite a bit of a difference compared to Apple Store. Such openness makes us believe Google Android has very prosperous future. The community, apparently, is very active. We have had more then 100 installations within 2 hours after upload, and 26 reviews within the same time (provided, we did not announce anything – just uploaded into the market, yes, that easy).

Here is what most recent comments are about:

Check it out and let us know what YOU think!

The game is open-source, as most of our pilot projects. The source code can be found here. (We will actually upload it tomorrow – as soon as Google repositories become writable again, they had extended maintenance today).