Grammar Pop, Level 18
I get asked this question a lot, and I’ll start by saying I have nothing “against” Android, and I wish Grammar Pop were available there as much as you do. Here’s why it isn’t:
1. I made the game in a way that makes it almost impossible for it to work with all the different Android devices.
When we got bids from developers to make Grammar Pop, they were all ridiculously out of reach, so I decided to make the game myself. This meant I had to learn how to make games, and as a beginner, I didn’t always make the most elegant programming choices.
This is a problem because I wrote the game so that it detects the screen size of your device and then resizes the game to make it look right. It was not a problem with the few iOS devices that existed at the time, but what I didn’t think of is that there are many, many different Android devices with different screen sizes. This causes two problems:
a) Hard coding all those screen sizes would take a long time and would very likely make the game run so slowly it wouldn’t be fun.
b) I can’t test the game on every Android device to make sure it works. And when I did try to make the game for Android (I definitely tried!), the first time I tested it on the appropriate device, it didn’t resize properly even though it had looked fine in a simulator, which makes me even more disinclined to release it into the wild without being able to test it on every device. I won’t release a product that is unlikely to work for some of the people who buy it.
2. People tell me the way we sell the game won’t work well on Android.
Grammar Pop doesn’t have ads or in-app purchases. You buy it and that’s it. People tell me that piracy is so common on Android that you can’t make money with an app that people just buy.
So if you’re wondering why I don’t just hire someone to make an Android version from scratch, this is one of the reasons. Also, see Part 1: developers are expensive.
Although people tell me they like the game, sales aren’t high enough to remotely justify the cost of hiring a developer to completely remake it, especially when it seems like sales from Android wouldn’t be as much as sales from iOS. (Also there are reasons we don’t want to add in-app purchases or ads to fix this problem.)
3. There’s some kind of problem with international sales tax.
My memory on this is fuzzy, but I also remember when we looked into this four years ago, there’s something like Apple takes care of all the international taxes for purchases through their app store and Android doesn’t. We definitely didn’t want to deal with filing lots of international taxes.
So there you go. I don’t hate Android or Android users. It would just be hard (if not impossible) to make the current app work on all the different devices, and there aren’t enough reasons to justify the cost of remaking it from scratch.
If for some reason you got this far, and you’d like the Apple version, here are the links:
Grammar Pop HD: This only works on the iPad, but if you are only going to play on the iPad, it’s laid out a bit nicer for the iPad than the other version.
Grammar Pop Universal: This works on all iOS devices.