Crosswalk (or Android?) seems to kind of suck?

I have an app with 2000+ users and growing. It is working very well in construct 2. I exported it to Crosswalk and uploaded to Google Play.

So far so good.

Now, however, I'm getting *lots* of one star reviews from people saying that it doesn't run on their phones or crashes the device. I excluded some of the phones in the Developer Console but still the majority of reviews are 'doesn't work' 'turns off by itself' etc.

I tested it on four devices and on every one of them it was working perfectly but as the user base grows, so does the range of various devices. The worst part is, the people who like the app rate it occasionally, while those for whom it doesn't work rate it 90% of the time (1-star).

I *love* Construct 2 but I HATE that the underlying system is HTML5.

Welcome to publishing on Android.

There's ~19,000 Android devices now: http://www.droid-life.com/2014/08/21/op ... t-devices/

Most of them are utter rubbish, so you can forget about running any complex games on it. Many of them use custom Android OS which leads to incompatibilities. Some of them use mods like Cyanogen, again, leading to incompatibility issues.

As long as your game runs on the most popular devices, you're good to go. Things like Nexus 4,5,7,10, and good models of Samsung, LG, etc etc. It's a royal pain to block each device manually since we don't even know what they all are, and under the dev panel it gives the codenames usually.

All you can do is put up with that and hope your game is good enough to get more 5 stars to balance itself out.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... omad&hl=en

I got 15 1-star rating so far. Out of those, 14 were from devices that couldn't run it. 1 guy thought it deserved 1 star due to gameplay issues (valid opinion). <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_biggrin.gif" alt=":D" title="Very Happy">

You know something else insane? Lots of social apps like to run in the background, hogging resources and potentially conflict with running apps. I had a few ppl tell me their game would crash unless apps like Dragon Talk or some Messenger app was forced closed prior to running my games. O_o

Did you disable the GPU blacklist? This sounds like the consequence of doing that, since the GPU blacklist exists to avoid graphics driver bugs, and graphics driver bugs can cause kernel-level crashes that reset the OS.

Driver bugs affect native software too, I'd add.

Ashley Thanks, I'll search for how to do that in a sec.

BTW, is there any way of limiting the Android version the app can be installed on? Looking at the developer console 100% of the crashes come from Android 2.3.3-2.3.7

So it seems the app simply doesn't work with these versions. I'd much rather just exclude them. There is a 'Minimum Android version' in the XDK but it doesn't seem to project to Google Play in any way.

— That game seems fun, I'll install it. In its description it says 'Requires android 4.2'. Did you set that requirement yourself?

Crosswalk definitely only works on Android 4.0+. I'd have thought it wouldn't let you install it on older versions by default. Surely the Google Play Developer Console has an option to limit the Android versions?

pirx Crosswalk APK has a default requirement of OS 4+ so there's no way 2.3 would be able to install it, I never had that occur when I used Crosswalk. As for my own game, 4.2+ is my own setting. It's in the AndroidManifest.xml file in your APK. I wrote a tutorial on how to decompile an APK and edit the manifest file and recompile it.

Ashley The Console has no such options, it gives you a list of thousands of individual devices, which are compatible by default. You then have to flag each device to block it.. its really a frustrating experience because it list device code names and you have to search each one to find out about its specs.

Since you're here, I just need to know, is Scirra planning on releasing official plugins compatible with Crosswalk/XDK?

Examples here: Includes the much needed IAP & AdMob support.

I just want something official and supported down the road.

My Crosswalk app is definitely getting error reports from android 2.3.3-2.3.7. However:

I just discoverd that you can set the minimum Android version in the XDK but you need to reference it by api levels: so it is 14 for android 4.0 etc. so maybe it will work. Currently my APKs say: 10 API levels required in the Console, so they are *surely* available for 2.x devices.

If Crosswalk requires Android 4 then it would explain why it crashes on these devices.

As — said, the developer console has no option to limit the Android version, which I find rather odd. I have no issue with the codenames though, I just go to the error reports and look at which devices cause crashes, then flag them by the same names.

API levels are just the technical version number. API level 14+ corresponds to Android 4.0+. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history

in the XDK the is a project option in build settings select crosswalk then set the Minimum Android version to 14

Looks like we went to far in flexibility. I filed an XDK bug report to prevent/warn developers from making an apk that will install on a system where it does not work.