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We're working on a port of an iPhone game to Android. One of the additional hurdles with this is all the different device resolutions Android has. We're having our art team rework the art for each target resolution (we're only picking a few for now with more later.)

My question is, can we (and how best to do it) submit separate packages for each resolution to the Google Market under a single title so that when someone purchases it they get a specific resolution?

UPDATE 7/21/2011

Although we released without it, it was just announced that the Google Android Market now officially supports multiple APKs for a single app.

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/07/multiple-apk-support-in-android-market.html

Nick Gotch
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You don't have to do extensive job to support every possible screen size, you only need to make resources for several configurations and Android will do the rest. The major concept here is that there are several screen densities you have to support. Once you've made a resource for each density, Android will automatically use an appropriate resource for the specific device. You only upload a single application for all the devices.

You should read an article on supporting multiple screens and also on providing resources.

Malcolm
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  • Please have a look at these links. Targeting specific device resolutions on Android is a fundamentally broken approach. – adamp May 04 '11 at 18:09
  • Yep, exactly. The formal answer would be "you can't" because you're supposed to upload a single universal version instead of making several ones. The job of managing differences between devices is done by Android itself, not by the Market. – Malcolm May 04 '11 at 18:14
  • The problem I have is the code is written in C++ and has values depending on the size of images. Our image assets are designed specifically for screen res, including large image backdrops. Each resolution asset folder is ~25MB. I'm going to try to consolidate those but I fear including all the resolutions in one package will be enourmous – Nick Gotch May 04 '11 at 18:57
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    I may suggest two other options. First one is that you make only high-resoultion version and let Android scale down resources if needed. The second one is downloading necessary resources onto each device from your servers after the installation of the app. – Malcolm May 04 '11 at 19:50
  • I may try to do a mix of these different options. The art team is picky about the quality loss of automatically resizing images, especially when stretching due to different aspect ratios is involved. Downloading the assets might be feasible but I'll have to try it. Thanks for the suggestions! – Nick Gotch May 04 '11 at 20:18
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I have not seen such an option while uploading my own applications to the market. This is a good/official explanation of how to program to various screen resolutions.

If it is impossible for your to package all of your resolution-specific resources into the app, you can download the images from your servers after the initial start-up of the app. At that point, you'll be able to grab the screen resolution details and only download what you need.

Haphazard
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