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I wondered if I was missing something as to why so few early iOS games (circa 2008/2009/2010) were ported to Android, bearing in mind that Android hadn’t won yet
well
turns out there was no native code SDK for Android that supported OpenGL ES until September 2009 lmao
meanwhile the iPhone SDK was released in March 2008, and of course that’s a fully native code SDK, so not only do you have the option to write C or C++, it’s very easy to do so, and of course you have full access to OpenGL ES, OpenAL and many other things games need
so there was a gap of one and a half years, which is an eternity in those early days, where porting games to Android didn’t make sense
this explains so much hahahaha
to this day Android still sucks to write games for because nobody in their right mind writes a real-time application like that in Java, so you want to use something like C++, but almost all of Android’s API surface is Java and the native SDK (NDK) doesn’t expose enough
@hikari the first few generations of Android phones lacked hardware GPUs. Android released the NDK as soon as it had hardware that benefited from it.
@palevich I don’t think that’s true? the T-Mobile G1, the first commercially-available Android phone, had a Qualcomm MSM7201A SoC, and that had an OpenGL ES-capable GPU in it. I’d be shocked if any Android phones didn’t have GPUs honestly
@hikari Hmm, good point.