“This article was created on my old blog in 2012”

Since the release of the first game on the Android Market I have faced the usual problems on the HW differences of the different Android devices on the market.

I think this is the actual limitation of the Android platform, a lack in the HW standards.

This limitation forces every developer to perform endless sessions of quality testing on a multitude of devices that ofter represent a serious limitation for and indie team.

Not all the people of starting teams can afford to have tens of devices for testing and, even if they can, no one can guarantee that the application won’t crash on a specific sub version of the HW or a specific version of Android.

As if it was not enough the presence of a multitude of custom Roms, custom access levels (root access), anti virus and anti spy-wares make the situation out of control and almost impossible to be handled by simple human beings.

Besides, if you decide to go for a custom code written in C, eventually using the Android NDK, things gets harder and harder.

Just to report an example of this, when we released the version 1.7 of Fantasy Racing, we started received bad reviews (four one star in one day, terrible!) and we didn’t know how to react.
In the comments our users reported things like “always crashes” or “does not start” while on our devices the game was rock solid and very stable.

We realized that all the users reporting the errors were running the game either on Galaxy SII or Galaxy Note which are 2 very common devices in the Android market.
We started digging around and we found many forums talking about bugs specific for these devices. Bugs were pointing to ADMOB compatibility or the soundpool bug. We released fixes for these problems but apparently nothing changed, we continued to receive bad reviews from our users.

We decided then to procure some devices having the same specs and we found out that on a Galaxy SII of a friend of ours, the game went very smoothly while on a Galaxy SII of another friend it constantly crashed.

To cut a long story short, we found out that the problem was depending on our PATRIA3D Engine which used to ask the GPU to draw an “not existing” Vertex Buffer Object in some game conditions and that the GPU on these devices (Mali 400) raised an error blocking the game.

The same problem didn’t happen on our testing devices using different GPU families such as PowerVR, Adreno or NVidia.

In simple words, the problem was caused by a bug in our code but we had different behaviors depending on the GPU installed on the devices (though I think it is mostly related to the OpenGL driver implementation of the device).

We have now fixed the problem and the game is rock solid on those devices but unfortunately the bad reviews remains like a stain we cannot remove.

We still cannot explain why on same Galaxy S2 devices the game worked fine but start thinking about them as mysteries of the Android World.