Android publishing for Google Play device support

neoman

Hello Everyone,

I just published my first Android App on Google Play. My app works on devices with screen resolution of 480x800, 720x1280, 768x1280 and 800x1280 or around that size. It will not work properly on Android tablets due to the larger screen size and the overscan feature. It was a pain to manually untick 2217 devices which I was not sure if the app would be supported on or not.

Google determines the devices supported based on the application manifest. Is there a way I can set the screen resolution option when publishing the app with Game Salad so only devices with the screen resolution I specify will be supported in the application manifest that way I will not have to untick 2217 devices manually in the future. Your help or advice on how other users address this issue would be appriciated.

Thank you in advance.

FinishTheCode

Trying to work this out too. My app will work on tablets but not sure how it will run on Smartphones. I would have a lot of unticking to do and researching those devices to see if they were tablets or phones. It really puts me off publishing to Android.

neoman

@FinishTheCode Yes it is a pain. You will not be able to keep up with the devices there are so many. Also there are new ones being released all the time. You can test the screen resolution for multiple devices from inside Game Salad Creator v 0.10.1 using the custom resolution option with the crop option selected that way you don't need to test it on multiple physical devices. The only thing is that you need to add the custom resolution every time you preview your game as this setting does not get saved. I have emailed Game Salad Support suggesting they add a screen resolution option when we publish to Android then you can set the options your app supports then that gets added to the application manifest. This way we will not need to untick many devices as Google will detect this automatically. Game Salad might consider it in their future development road map. The ideal solution would be a universal build for all devices. I am only going to publish the apps which do well on the App Store to Google Play as it is not worth the effort if there is no return. It would be good if Google accepted letter boxed applications then we wouldn't have a problem.