Unity Android and the Android Market Licensing (LVL) – a cautionary tale…

If you’ve been following this blog then you no doubt know all about my augmented reality game Zombie Room AR. What you may not know is how much of a struggle I’ve had trying to support it. If you look at the demo version in the android market you’ll see a crap  load of 1 star reviews saying the game crashes and that I suck and other idiotic comments. Over the past year I’ve been an Android developer and I know that the Star ratings and comments are on par with youtube comments, so I’ve brushed most of these off…

Unfortunately, the one thing these comments have in common is that they’re right… the game just crashes on a lot of devices… mysterious crashes that leave me scratching my head in wonder. The strangest thing is that when the game crashes, it just sort of exits. Typically when a program crashes on Android you get a box pop up with a “Force Close” or “Report” option. If you click “Report” it sends a stack trace to the developer, which will give him a clue about what the problem is. I never got one stack trace, so I had absolutely nothing to go off of. I have 4 different Android devices I test against I have not ever been able to reproduce this issue. In some cases I’ve had customers reach out to me by email asking what the deal is… and I’ve never had a good answer for it… Until today.