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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Google Play definitely needs this. However,

> Every limitation of the system is the fault of the developer of the app, and the reason the app is slow is because the developer is bad (not because the customer picked a phone with a 700mhz CPU).

I think it is the responsibility of the developer to ensure their apps work on the devices they are selling to. If a user is able to install the app from Play, it should work. Google Play shouldn't be a wild-west scenario, where some apps work and some apps don't. If the app doesn't work on the phone, I would definitely suggest the developer has some of the blame.

Testing apps and ensuring they work on all phones is clearly impossible, but by limiting the availability of your app to high-end phones and detecting hardware in code and acting appropriately is our responsibility as developers in a diverse ecosystem.

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>Google Play shouldn't be a wild-west scenario

Unfortunately, this is what Android is, so this is what the marketplace has to be. I don't have apps on the Google Play market, so I don't know if you can restrict your app to only be visible or purchased by phones known to run it, but there are some apps that slower phones just can't run.

Take Grand Theft Auto III for example (or any other high-end game). You can't expect it to run on an HTC Aria with a 600Mhz processor. Should we stop making these high end apps, or should we expect that there would be some kind of control system to help prevent people from making uninformed decisions?

> Unfortunately, this is what Android is, so this is what the marketplace has to be.

I don't think so, really. Android is the wild west because it's open source and unrestricted. But the Market is Google's own, proprietary and closed system. They have total control over it. App developers can restrict on a device-by-device basis, but it's a pain and I don't really expect anyone to do that (there are maybe 1,000 devices or so out there). However, you can also restrict based on phone feature set like screen size, hardware capability, etc.

I think we should hold both Google and the developers to a high standard when it comes to marketplace apps.

> Should we stop making these high end apps

Of course not. Developers should stop selling them to people who they know can't run them.

Unfortunately most of us aren't able to buy the million devices out there to test with. More annoyingly we usually only find out about a device not working when someone writes a 1 star review such as "dont work HTC <xyz> cm7".

I've had people email me and get nasty because my app didn't work on their Touchpad with ICS. Or even better when people write low reviews from Tegra 2 devices such as "Textures missing" but they are using a kernel which reduces allocated video RAM from 128mb to 64mb.

I love Android from a user point of view but I hate it as a developer.

If you are lucky they will write that review. More likely they will just say "does not even run, the biggest disgrace since wwii".

I'm sorry to hear that any Touchpad + ICS users have been so frustrating for you. In general I've been very happy with the Cyanogenmod on Touchpad community, but with the huge number of TPs that got dumped into the market there are some people who really don't get that when software is labelled "Alpha" and has warning about most apps not working, it's not the fault of a 3rd party developer when something doesn't work. Weirdly enough the webOS side of the community seems to be a lot more understanding despite really high overlap between the sides. Maybe it's the unity through adversity thing? Either way, hopefully as CM stabilizes on the Touchpad the users will get less annoying for you.

Ah, I didn't know if apps could be restricted (as I mentioned). Maybe there should be a flag in the market that tells the developer "it looks like your app might not run without a 1Ghz processor". I would imagine smaller devs wouldn't have a wide range of test devices.

There has to be a better way.

It'd be nice if the market could offer a free copy to the first user of each phone model and then asked him for simple feedback ("Does it run smoothly? [Yes/No]").

You can limit (by device) which phones/tablets can download your app from Google Play. If the developer doesn't take the time to consider the requirements of his/her app and limit its availability accordingly, they deserve the poor ratings.

Yes, customers should also be aware of what their phone is capable of, but the developer has some responsibility here.

Take Grand Theft Auto III for example (or any other high-end game). You can't expect it to run on an HTC Aria with a 600Mhz processor.

Don't know if it has changed but when GTA III was new (on android) my phone, Nexus S, wasn't supported - and thus I couldn't even find it in market.

Offtopic.. But I'm not so sure about this.

I used to work on downloadable desktop apps, and we always played to the lowest common denominator. It ended up being a big weight around our neck when we wanted to do something 'cooler' but a little more resource intensive. I think we supported Windows 95 even after Microsoft stopped... simply because so many end users were still running it.

Another example: We have a "lesser" brand of mobile phone now, and I notice angry birds is frustrating to play on it... Even though it's perfectly acceptable on an old 8Gb iPod touch I had. Sure, they could spend a lot of resources on it to make it better, but that's likely to be a poor usage of resources.

You definitely need to hit the sweet spot of the performance bell curve, though.

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