Google Play APK filtering for MALI?

Hi Stephane,

Unfortunately this isn't anything we have any control over.  It is certainly possible to specify minimum required GLES versions for the application, or filter based on supported textures, but as you said Mali does not have a format you can filter on, and specifying a MAXIMUM GLES version isn't possible.

It would be possible to use the Google Play Developer Console to *manually* specify supported device but this is a massively arduous and un-scalable task and there aren't any lists of android devices running specific hardware such as Mali 4XX GPUs available.

The only thing I could suggest would be to allow the application to be downloaded and installed, but add a check within the application itself to see what hardware it is being run on and to proceed from there.

Hope this helps,

Rich

Hi Rich,

Sadly, our product is a relatively large 1GB download. Notifying the user post-install isn't great but I guess our options are limited on this. Would be great if Play provided more expansive filtering based on GL extensions (rather than just texture formats + min GLES version), then GL_MALI_* could be used.

Best,

Stephane

Hi Stephane,

This does indeed sound like a great filter that I am sure others would also benefit from. Unfortunately this is out of our hands, and completely up to Google. I hope you have luck convincing them

An alternative approach, one we have seen other apps do, is to have a relatively small app to be installed, without the assets included.

This would, on first run, analyse the device and figure out which bundle of assets should be downloaded for that particular device, then will download the additional files. Subsequent runs simply check that it has assets available and proceeds with the game.

This way you could potentially minimise the download size by only having the assets that would work for the given device, utilising the best texture compression method that the device uses, for example.

Have you thought about this approach and whether it would work for you?

I hope this helps, any further questions feel free to ask them.

Kind Regards,

Michael McGeagh

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the suggestion. Definitely something we thought of, but not viable for a few reasons on our end.

User data payload (OBB) is 1GB per device configuration. Post install download would require that we host this data rather than the Google/Other storefronts.

Additionally the post install download would also eat into the Google Play refund period (15 mins after initial app launch).

Will see if I can convince Google to introduce new filter criterion.

Thanks,

Stephane