Porting to Android - Learn SpriteBuilder for iOS Game Development - page 459

And what point is there in porting an app to Android if it hasn't been proven to be suc-
cessful on the iOS platform? My thoughts exactly. As an experienced developer, at least
you can extrapolate the next app's likelihood of success from your earlier app's successes
and failures and build on your previous experiences.
The downside of porting after an iOS release is that once you do have a complete app
that's never been tested to run on Android, it will likely be more difficult to get it initially
working on Android. Which I understand is increasingly more difficult in particular for
beginning developers.
Every cross-platform decision you didn't have to make thus far will come to haunt you all
at once. The only advice I can give for such cases is to push through. Tackle one problem
at a time, as tiny as it may seem. Every fix gets you closer to the goal.
But even if that should fail, or simply proves to be too much work, I have an alternative
proposition to make. Imagine you do have a successful iOS app and you continue to earn
some extra cash. You can now do one of two things with relative ease and comfort:
Hire and pay another developer to (help you) port your SpriteBuilder project
to Android.
Begin working on the improved successor of your game, or simply your next
app idea. Start from scratch, but this time build it as a cross-platform app
from the start. Spend that extra cash on Android devices for testing.
The common misconception held by beginning developers that I continue to warn about is
this: building an app for multiple platforms from the start does not increase your chances
of success.
It does increase your financial success if you have a successful app in the first place. But
an app that fails on iOS because it simply isn't a good quality app or users have no real
use for it is going to fail on any platform. Yet building a quality app that has the same
level of quality on multiple platforms takes more time and resources. So even if the over-
all revenue is higher for both platforms together, the “revenue for time spent” ratio may
actually be less than if you had published for one platform only.
Plus, you now have to do everything post-release twice: releasing updates, answering cus-
tomer support questions, and so on—even the amount of marketing increases.
To put you in the right mindset: unless you have a few published titles under your belt (on
any platform), I recommend you focus on publishing your app for iOS exclusively. Once
an app does become successful, thanks to the SpriteBuilder Android plugins, you can port
after the iOS release with relative ease. Otherwise, just make another iOS app.