This is the third of a four-part story documenting my somewhat excruciating and wholly uncharted experience developing an indie game for Panasonic’s obscure VIERA Connect television app market several years ago.
In the first part of this postmortem, I detailed the pains of becoming a VIERA Connect third party developer and struggles of setting up the rigid development environment required by Panasonic.
For the past couple of months, I've been working on a much-delayed update to my Android application Scribblify. The original Android version was released back in early 2013 and hadn't been updated on Google Play since then. Although it paled in comparison to the iOS counterpart, the first Android version still received positive reviews and was downloaded 200,000 times. Having released a major 4.0 update to the iOS version earlier this year, it was time to bring the Android version up-to-speed.
One of the greater challenges experienced with Android development occurs when it comes time to test. I previously wrote about the increasingly fragmented iOS platform, but even with a handful of different iOS devices sporting different resolutions and technical specs, nothing quite compares to Android device dispersion. In my updated Android app, for instance, I support all Android devices from API Level 15 (Android 4.0.3) up. According to Google Play, this makes the app compatible with 9,098 Google-certified devices. This list encompasses at least four years of devices including phones, tablets, phablets and more. Understandably, with such a large range of devices comes an equally large range of technical specs.
This is the second of a four-part story documenting my somewhat excruciating and wholly uncharted experience developing an indie game for Panasonic’s obscure VIERA Connect television app market.
In the first part of this postmortem, I detailed the pains of becoming a VIERA Connect third party developer and struggles of setting up the rigid development environment required by Panasonic. Now I turn my attention to the actual development process using the company’s available API.
This is the first of a four-part story documenting my somewhat excruciating and wholly uncharted experience developing an indie game for Panasonic's obscure VIERA Connect television app market.
In 2011, I purchased my first SmartTV—a Panasonic TC-P42ST30 Plasma 1080p HDTV. This was the period of time when smart televisions were just starting to take off, with most manufacturers offering integrated WiFi support and a handful of apps from top media companies including Netflix and Amazon. Each brand was doing all that it could to stand out in the crowd of high-definition televisions. Some HDTVs, for instance, came bundled with remote controllers that included slide-out keyboards for easy online interaction. Panasonic observed the app phenomena that was taking the mobile world by storm and evidently wanted a piece of that pie.
