• Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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    10 months ago

    Honestly, as somebody who really loved the early era of Android gaming, I’m really disappointed how ephemeral it all was between the Play Store delistings and the absolutely atrocious approach to backwards compatibility in the Android OS.

    • aluminium@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Yep I found out myself pretty quickly. With a simple App which was maybe 10K lines of code I started targeting Android 10 and so far every new major version caused some issue with the code as Google constantly messes around with files, permissions, …

      I can’t imagine what a task it is to maintain a game.

      • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        I just wish Google would release some kind of 32-bit Android 4.4 sandboxed compatibility layer for old games. Android 4.4 was the standard Android version for a super long time for a zillion devices, and I’d bet 99% of the dead .APK games out there would run on that version.

        Give me a tool with a crapload of slow, clumsy emulation wrappers covered in tedious config options and a launcher any time I want to run an app through this compatibility layer and let me play Amazing Alex again.

        edit: it occurs to me I basically want an Android emulator for Android. Or like, a psuedo-emulator that’s not really an emulator like WINE/Proton.

          • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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            10 months ago

            Ahh, you know, it’s about the convenience of not having to juggle another device. I still have an old Galaxy Tab kicking around the house that plays all that stuff pretty well, but it’s not the same as being able to pull it out of my pocket on the bus.

            • cm0002@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Ya know, I actually had the idea a while back to run an android emulator on one of my servers and then setup remote access to it with some software that hopefully had an android client app.

              The idea being I would use the android remote client on my actual phone to use a “phone in the cloud”, ofc my original intentions for it wouldn’t have been affected too terribly by things like latency, but for games it may or may not work all that well (I never really got past the sketch out phase lol)

              • pirat@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                Why not try emulating it locally on your phone instead of a remote server, to eliminate the latency? Was it not possible at the time you got the idea?

                • cm0002@lemmy.world
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                  10 months ago

                  I thought about it, but the pros didn’t outweigh the cons for me. The biggest con being limited resources on a phone and a remote server would have relatively endless resources, and my use case could handle a little latency so the biggest pro wasn’t so big

    • atocci@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      Seriously, I can’t run a 32 bit game on a 64 bit processor? How is that even a problem on newer phones?

    • yamanii@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Yep, I never bought a game again after my CAVE shmups all stopped working when I switched phones, there’s also no way to try and make it work on your phone unlike any other operating system on PC since it’s so locked down, completely dependent on devs to care.