I was wondering what Android devices I should get for testing…
According to this http://blog.testobject.com/2012/10/most-common-android-phones.html Samsung Galaxy phones seem to be dominating the market. Now does that mean the best phone to get is the Galaxy S? The logic being, that if the game runs properly on the S1 it should also run on S2 and S3.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find any statistics that include Android tablets as well. Should I get one of these too? As far as I can tell, the Kindle Fire is the most popular one. Would it make sense to get one of these as well?
What do you think about services like http://www.deviceready.com/ ? Does it even make sense to use those for Unity games?
I hope you guys can help me out. I’m a little overwhelmed by the sheer amount of available Android devices. :?
Edit: I’ve just done some reading on the whole ARMv6 vs ARMv7 debate. Should I maybe get an ARMv6-based phone as well? Is it worth it in nowadays or is ARMv6 a dying breed?
My first game sold pretty well on google play, Cross court tennis. Game launched sept of 2011 and i only had a s1 back then, and released to armv6.
For my next game coming in july 2013 I test on the S2 for armv7 for shader and physics consistency. i also bought a kindle hd for testing. My game needs consistent physics.
As far as tablets go…
Kindle Fire HD is an excellent device for the money. It’s coped with everything I’'ve thrown at it (keep everything as optimised as possible and the graphics output is very impressive). With the same screen size as Nexus 7, roughly speaking if it works on Kindle it’ll work on N7 with a bit more oomph.
Hopefully these two will help standardise a regular screen size (A Galaxy Note also shares this resolution), and they give you access to both main markets, Google Play and Amazon.
My advice would be to test on a slightly dated phone. If your game performs well on an older device, then you should have no problems with the newer ones. I test using HTC Incredible S as my bottom line and Galaxy S2 as my standard.
On a side note, didn’t I read something about Unity developers having some serious problems with the Galaxy S1? (To the point where they were blocking it from downloading their apps to avoid bad ratings) - Or was this fixed at some point?
As for me, I am using my old china tablet MOMO Ployer 9C, it is quite good for creating low - end games ( Device : 7 inch 800*480 screen, 1.2 Ghz Single core, 512 mb ram, 8Gb ROM, ARMv7 ) Only one bad feature, that I spotted, is OpenGl 1.1, so it does not support some shaders But it is quite good for the price if you want cheap device for testing.
For ARMv6 tests I am using my good, old Samsung Galaxy Ace
This is rather interesting. I didn’t know that the device that Unity runs on can affect the physics performance. Is this a ARMv6 vs ARMv7 thing or are there differences between ARMv7 devices as well?
Do you happen to know any threads or articles on that topic? I did a bit of research and every thread I found, where somebody ran into physics issues on different devices, it was because of some improper code.
In our company we select several real devices to cover most popular screen size / gpu vendor / form factor combinations, e.g. there are 4 major GPU vendors and around 5 popular resolutions, we create table with all possible combinations and fill it according to statistics data for current period (end of spring 2014):
But it is quite good for the price if you want cheap device for testing.