Hello all,
I released an update for BreakTheBlocks Lite this past weekend. The main update was switching advertising providers from Admob to the beta for Google Adsense for Mobile Applications.
I have received some feedback regarding “lag” in this game. The main thing that can be done to prevent this lag is kill unneeded tasks with a task manager like Advanced Task Manager or Taskiller. Applciaitons that run in the background are still doing work, and creating new Java objects, so the Java Garbage Collector has to perform its duties more often. When the garbage collector runs it essentially blocks anything that my games can do, so there is a lag while my games wait to be able to run again. I am currently reviewing some enhancements to further help this problem from appearing so often, but the best thing to do for now is to kill unneeded tasks.
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So I have heard of the service offered at backupify.com, free backup of gmail, google docs, and a whole slew of online services. I would definitely like to be able to use this service, but after my first night I am now very cautious of it.
I opted for gmail backup, it is listed as “beta” on their site and there is even a little link to an article of theirs explaining that they had problems with gmail previously but that it has all been cleared up. So I signed up and went to bed with a warm fuzzy feeling thinking that all of my emails from 6 years of gmail would be backed up finally.
Well that warm fuzzy feeling drastically ended when I woke up this morning. My Nexus One had an error dialog up telling me that my google account username and password was incorrect. As a person that pretty much relies on Google for the majority of my business and personal life online this was extremely alarming. I attempted to log into gmail from my laptop as soon as I could and I was prompted with a screen informing me that my account had been flagged for suspicious activity and that I had to set a new password in order to clear my account. I obviously changed my password and updated all of my android phones with the new data and things were back to normal.
This was an easy enough problem to take care of, but for those 5 minutes of not knowing what had happened and thinking the worst (maybe my account was hacked) it was just a very unpleasant experience overall.
I look forward to the day when gmail backup can be easy and automated, but for now I have canceled the gmail backup from backupify until it leave beta. I guess I just want to put my experience out there for any Android developers that have thought about the service.
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Tonight PingPong Lite hit half a million downloads 
PingPong Pro is the paid version of this game. It is mostly the same game but has no ads and allows for fullscreen play. PingPong Pro sits in the 500-1000 downloads category on the market which is a 0.2% conversion rate from users of the version.
Thanks to all of the users who downloaded this game, hopefully we will see the million mark by the end of the year.
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Day 1 of ads on two of my most popular free games and all I can think is why did I not do this sooner? Seriously the amount of money brought in today is only a fraction of what I make daily from app sales but will definitely be significant over time. I should have done this months ago when I first heard of AdMob, integrating the ads was much simpler than I expected. I was very pleased to learn 2 things during that process.
#1) The only permission that you HAVE to add to your application is android.permission.INTERNET, which is very common for all apps. I was under the impressions from their initial sdk that they released that it required the receive MMS permission as well as the gps location permission. The location permission can still be used for targeted ads, but I don’t feel it is necessary to add such requirements to simple games.
#2.) The ads don’t have to be static spaces on the screen. I never really bothered to try their initial SDK so I wasn’t aware of this. I just assumed that the ads were like banner ads on websites, that they would take up a static space on the screen. I just recently started using an Android phone as my main phone and have seen apps that do this. I was very pleased to learn that you can choose when to display ads, for me it is at the pause and “game over” screens.
I also was fully expecting user backlash, I was under the impression that the users of the Android Market despised ads and would down vote applications with ads and voice their opinions in comments, it has now bee 24 hours and I haven’t heard a single piece of negative feedback about the ads at all.
My only gripe is payout, I very much like the Google Checkout integration with the Android market, when someone buys an app I receive the money about 4 days after they purchased the app directly deposited into my checking account. I get deposits 5 days a week and this has proven to be a very nice and very convenient system. The AdMob payout structure is like this, at the end of the month your balance is noted, a the beginning of next month they process that balance, and within a week they will cut you a check and mail it to you or directly deposit it into your paypal account. So in other words if you make $500 in January it will be processed at the beginning of March and you should expect to receive a check by mid March. It is nice to know this up front, but after being spoiled by the convenience of the Android Market payout system it does seem a little long.
So yeah, it has only been one day, but I definitely feel like I should have implemented this months ago and I will be sure to implement ads on all of my “Lite” software that I release form here on out.
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Tonight I uploaded updates for PingPong, both the pro($0.99) and lite(free) versions have been updated being built with the Android 1.6 sdk but with the MinSDK set to Android 1.5 so that the majority of Android users will now have access to these games again including users of the HTC Tattoo.
Also I’m trying out serving ads in PingPong Lite and BreakTheBlocks Lite from AdMob to try and monetize these popular free programs some other way than just selling full versions.
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On Sunday February 14th, 2010 I had my first application ever to reach over 1 million downloads, BreakTheBlocks
Here is what my developers console shows as of today (Tuesday Feb 16, 2010)
Over 1 million people have downloaded this game, and half of them still have it installed on their phone
Yes, this is a free version of a paid game that sells for $1.99, but no, 1 million free downloads does not equal a super phat paycheck that I can retire off of. I won’t release the specific number but BreakTheBlocks Full has sold between 5,000 and 10,000 copies, which are the numbers that you would find if you were reading the information about the game on the Android Market on an actual device. So in other words less than 1% of the people who downloaded this game, and less than 2% of the install base, have decided to pay for the full game. That is fine, I appreciate all the people that have bought the full version and welcome any and all new users.
Last week I also managed to quit cold turkey one of the most addictive substance on the planet, World of Warcraft, and in celebration of these 2 achievements I decided it was time to update my website and start working on some new Android projects.
I have already started on my next Android game, expect it to be coming out late March/early April. What is it? Well you will just have to wait to see.
Thank you to everyone who has downloaded this game, I hope to continue to bring fun games with mass appeal to the Android platform.
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Hello everyone, I am currently setting up this Word Press blog to serve as my new website. While I get it all figured out you can still visit the old website
I just released updates for all versions of WordWrench and BreakTheBlocks and published them on the Android Market.
The changes are relatively minor. Both games were updated to support more phones by building against the 1.6 SDK but setting the minimum SDK to 1.5, so 95% of Android users should now have access to these popular games, including HTC Tattoo users.
Also WordWrench users should no longer have issues with the bottom row of buttons being cut off, I believe this was due to my last build being incorrectly build against Android 1.1
