Replacing Cordova
While the growth of Hex FRVR has been amazing, the succes of the game has been limited by the quality of my mobile versions. So far I have been using a fork of Cordova to build for mobile and while it has been great for prototyping and getting up and running. It’s simply not good enough to be used for big game releases.
Let’s look at why I think that is:
- Even though WkWebView provides a substantially faster and more stable iOS experience it’s not yet supported. While partially fixable with Crosswalk. Crosswalk comes with at-least ~10MB of overhead (Much bigger than the games themself).
- You need a 3rd party plugin to do pretty much anything besides showing a webpage with Cordova. These plugins are often either out of date, buggy or both!
- Facebook The best Facebook plugin only supports Facebook SDK version 3.21.1 which is not compatible with Xcode 7+
- Ads The most popular AdMob plugin straight up steals 2% of the advertisement views. A fact hidden away in an obscure README.md as a code comment.
- The development flow takes about 2 minutes to build and run on my somewhat older mac, making it cumbersome to test integrations.
- Quite a lot of the bugs people are reporting are also results of Cordova behaviour.
- You cannot listen to your own music while playing the game on iOS.
- Music keeps playing when exiting the app on Android.
- Multi window view for iOS is at best badly supported.
Lastly and worse, pretty much all existing iOS sessions currently end with the app crashing, not because people want to stop playing. Just look at this graph from Itunes Connect.
All in all it feels like Cordova is a great platform if you are able to write your own plugins and fix the occasional bug in the main engine. However if you are doing that, there just don’t seem to be any compelling reason to use Cordova at all.
So what then?
For some time now, I have wanted to find a developer to create custom wrappers for the FRVR games. In hindsight I wish I had done it before I released Hex FRVR as I have now needed to scramble to have it done.
The good news is that I found a unicorn of a developer that is able to build the iOS, Android and even future platform wrappers, while also being amazing at API design and JavaScript. Even more impressive is that the iOS wrapper is already fully done with the last work being done to the Android wrapper I write this blog post.
As the wrappers are written specifically for my games, we also took the opportunity to tightly integrate with my game engine, offloading some of the work the browser normally does to native code running in the wrapper. So far this has yielded a 20%-30% performance improvement compared to running the games in the devices system browser.
It’s also crazy nice to work with, here is a quick video showing the development speed on iOS.
All in all, I hope to have new versions of the game live on all platforms in about a weeks. I have even taken the time to make the game more fun for people who are really good at puzzle games!