Recently I attempted to port our iOS game over to Android < 2.2. My motivation was to use the opportunity as a learning experience and refactor my code to run on multiple mobile platforms. When I started coding B.I.T.S Pinball I picked C/C++ even though it wasn't a language I use every day (it is now). The thinking was that I didn't want to pick a language that would tie us to a specific platform, a luxury game developer usually have.
I got to the point where I just felt marred down by the Android NDK and the platform. This was after I ported my game over to Palm WebOS using their NDK in a couple of weeks of my spare time! The Palm PDK isn't bad at all, their tools need work but that's another story for another time.
With the Android NDK doing simple things like loading and playing a sound effect, handling device input events, loading a texture from assets in your apk (loading any resources for that matter), figuring out which texture format and compression format is supported, (which isn't easy when you have 100+ devices that might do this differently, I'll get into texture units in another post) it's just cumbersome. This is on top of having to cross back and forth between the JVM and native code using JNI, I wanted to take a bath, it just feels dirty.
Thankfully with Android 2.3 Google clearly acknowledges the importance of having native games on their platform and the only way to do that is to provide developers almost direct access to the hardware (without having to write JNI code to go back into the JVM that probably calls back into native code). There are a few places the NDK falls short:
- There’s still not way to get to the device sensors such as the accelerometer, mic and such without going through JNI to call into the JVM (please correct me if I’m wrong).
- Carriers hold their customers hostage by preventing them from receiving new updates and forcing them to upgrade their devices and renew their cellphone plan to get new OS versions. So basically game developers are stuck with < 2.3 for a lot longer then Google or Android developers would like.
Tangent:
If Microsoft has any chance of staying relevant in the mobile space they are going to have to do the same. They really have no choice ATM, they don’t have the user base (this is huge), they don’t have tools that are vastly superior (sure VS is nice) and they force you to write/rewrite everything using Silverlight or XNA… ouch. They’re basically saying, “if you want to be on our platform you have to ditch your currently platform or double your efforts”. Ummm, they can’t get away with that anymore.
B.I.T.S Pinball 
