Game developer Mika Mobile has announced that it will no longer be supporting Android since the platform is simply not lucrative enough to justify the development and support costs it requires.
Mika Mobile, maker of the popular mobile games Zombieville USA and Battleheart, said in a blog post Friday that it spent around 20 percent of its time in 2011 dealing with Android issues like "porting, platform specific bug fixes, [and] customer service" while Android sales amounted to just 5 percent of its revenue.
"Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable," the company said. Part of the issue comes down to Androids OS fragmentation. Mika Mobile said it has spent thousands of dollars purchasing various devices on which to test its Android apps. And, ensuring support for the many Android devices requires constant tweaks.
"I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through," the company wrote.
And Google's recent change to increase the size limit on its Android apps from 50MB to 4GB comes as little help, Mika Mobile said. Re-engineering an app to work with the new system would only require extra work.
"From a purely economic perspective, I can no longer legitimize spending time on Android apps, and the new features of the market do nothing to change this," Mika Mobile said. "While this news may be disappointing, I hope people can accept that we've done everything we can reasonably do to bring our apps to as many potential players as possible, despite the obstacles."
As of Monday, Zombieville USA and Battleheart were both still available in the Android Market.
For more, see Google's Schmidt Not Convinced Android is Fragmented and Hey, Google: Here's What Fragmentation Means.