Hi Mali Devs,
We are soon releasing a HL based app and are wondering if there's a way to filter for pre ES 3.0 Mali devices (400-MP and friends). Due to the builds targeting this category using ETC1 and Mali not having a proprietary compressed texture format to filter on, is there another way to do so ("uses-library", "uses-feature"...)?
Thanks!
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,