No matter which way you look at the numbers, there’s one truth when it comes to sales statistics in today’s mobile market: iOS’s App Store currently outsells the Android market by a good margin. Android is still a multi-million dollar industry, but when it comes to making a choice as a developer, it’s pretty hard not to drop your investment into the larger piggy bank.
No matter which way you look at the numbers, there’s one truth when it comes to sales statistics in today’s mobile market: iOS’s App Store currently outsells the Android market by a good margin. Android is still a multi-million dollar industry, but when it comes to making a choice as a developer, it’s pretty hard not to drop your investment into the larger piggy bank.
Then, once a successful iOS developer decides that they want to increase their reach into Android, further complications arise. Sometimes it takes months to move an iOS game to the new marketplace, as it did for Temple Run. Other times, developers find that moving a game from one platform to the other is just too complicated, and it never happens.
“I have a hard enough time dealing with therelatively few possible hardware configurations foriOS, so as a solo app developer, there’s no way I’d be able to support the hundreds of devices that run Android”, says Matt Rix, developer of Trainyard. “And it’s not just the technical aspects of porting to Android that frighten me, but also the fact that it’s a whole new ecosystem, with completely different marketplaces and user demographics.”
Noodlecake Studios (creators of Super Stickman Golf) have been through the trials and tribulations of cross-coding from one device to another, and they’re aiming to cut down on the frustration considerably with the announcement of their new program: Noodlecake Games.
The concept behind Noodlecake Games, a new porting and publishing company, is to use technology that allows iOS code to run natively on Android devices, making the iOS to Android process a whole lot easier. As a publisher, Noodlecake promises to handle all technical support and repairs for developers, too.
Noodlecake is so confident in the ease and convenience of their iOS to Android technology, that they’ve started up the “Game A Week Project” aimed to port one iOS game to the Android each week. The aforementioned Matt Rix’s Trainyard will be the first title in what looks to be a long line of Noodlecake ports.
If their technology is as impressive and easy-to-use as they claim it is, Android users could be seeing a huge influx of great iOS titles ported their way soon. While it’s unlikely that big-budget game developers will farm their money out to an external team to do porting for them, it could end up proving to be a fantastic resource for small iOS teams looking to increase exposure without getting their hands dirty.
