more info plugin by Scott Harrison

kakula · January 25, 2022, 9:44pm

Is the More Info Plugin still working with latest Epic Updates on Solar2D

Developing for Mobile is a true pain in the A#s

As a dot net developer, a program that you develop with almost any version of .net will work for almost any version of windows by downloading the adequate .net framework or required libraries

I have a system i developed with VB6 20 years ago and still working on windows 11 !!

but when developing for mobile you have to at least worry about android and ios, and each one of those keep changing API levels, requirements, rules, policies, technology and many other stuff by the month, which forces Solar2D to change everything every month, and forces plugin creators to change everything accordingly and if one thing works two other things crash

This is really painful, and most of the times it will cause damage … and it does not seem to ever stop … and frankly speaking it doesn’t feel right from google and ios sides … they have to stop changing everything every week … unless they are bad in system architecture

BDC · January 26, 2022, 9:51am

Yup - this is the painful reality of the weird and wacky (and not so wonderful) world of mobile development. Mobile ads are one of the worst aspects. Not Solar2D specific (so no criticism here of that worthy development kit) but ads continually break. You can test the bejesus out of your app, release it, and it will (very) soon break and need updating. Any apps not continually maintained on any store will soon rot and decay.

Scott_Harrison · January 29, 2022, 5:47am

Thought I responded but yes it still works

troylyndon · February 4, 2022, 6:17pm

I agree. Google and Apple continue to break apps that have always worked fine. I believe it is intentional, because they want A) users to always use the latest OS version, which maximizes revenue; and B) developers who no longer exist to have their apps removed.

BDC · February 9, 2022, 8:00am

@troylyndon - you got that absolutely right! I used to earn a living on the Apple App Store. Now it’s less than a trickle. This will be my last year developing for mobile if I can’t turn it around this year. I’m not optimistic. Like you, I’m in the quiz biz.

anon63346430 · February 10, 2022, 12:21am

As a legit dev why do you have a problem with that? The less shit in the stores is a bonus for everyone

troylyndon · February 10, 2022, 5:58am

That’s a good question. My answer? Because I’d rather spend my time on new features, rather than spend hours and hours to maintain an app that has been working fine for years.

kakula · February 12, 2022, 3:26pm

From my point of view, the main problems are in apps that I develop for my clients … because you can have apps or games for yourself, in your play store account, and you can build apps for people, which is 99.9% in my scenario, and when your client asks you for one single tiny update after a year of having it on their play store account, you expect to modify those few lines of code, and click build and publish again … then you start getting endless problems, sometimes they show up all together, and sometimes just a couple of them appear like:

Minimum SDK level
No longer supported (and there are many of those)
Plugin not working anymore
Old Plugins not working with recent Solar2D update
After recent Solar2D update unable to build for Apple or crashes for android and apple
Modify XML Manifest Files
Starting December 20?? this and that will not be supported any more or you have to change this and that
Minimum JDK update issue which will allow support for new required stuff but affect old stuff

And I’m sure many other things.

I’m not at all blaming Solar2d
Solar2D is my life

I’m blaming Google and Apple Companies and Engineers directly, because the cars that they make work for months, while cars should work for long

Imagine you buying a car, and a few months later someone tells you … " you have to replace this and that for your car to run or the gas station pump will change so you need to install a different piece to fill your car with gas"

BDC · February 13, 2022, 8:48am

@kakula - I agree. It’s one of the reasons I stopped doing client work. Endless breaking updates to apps.

The other reason I stopped doing client work was unrealistic expectations. Both on my part and the client. I have 30+ years development experience and a PhD in Computer Science. My expectations were unrealistic as to my earnings. Software is cheap (free!) and clients wanted a lot of work for not a lot of spend. Lots of competing developers offering to do work for $0.02. The clock is ticking on my time developing for mobile. I can almost hear the last seconds ticking out … tick, tick, silence.

For years Admob left me alone. Money accrued. Job done. Last 2 or 3 years, endless poking and prodding (i.e. emails and notifications in the console) to do this and update that. It’s not sustainable as a one man shop. Don’t get me started on Apple and their utterly incompetent review process. Too many breaking changes. An endless update cycle of breaking changes.

Fortunately I am not financially dependent on this rigmarole and merry-go-round. The ride has nearly finished and I am about to disembark for the final time.

anon63346430 · February 15, 2022, 12:36am

Surely you just bill this to the client?

troylyndon · February 15, 2022, 8:27am

@Scott_Harrison can you please answer the first post in this topic? It seems the community’s frustration with mobile development difficulties caused by Google and Apple have taken it over. But I’d still like to know; how’s work on a new or updated More Info plugin?

Scott_Harrison · February 15, 2022, 10:35pm

I pretty sure I answered the question, but MoreInfo works with the newest iOS and Android. In fact, it just got new features last week.

BDC · February 16, 2022, 10:12am

@kakula - and so it continues. I have an email from AdMob this morning titled, “Introducing the AdMob app readiness process”

"
Get your app ready for monetization with Google AdMob
Follow the app readiness process to enable full ad serving
"

I know my post comes across as negative. But alas, as a one man shop who has seen his income decimated in recent years, it’s another set of hoops to jump through. It’s enough as it is to contend with the vagaries of the App Store review process. Now I have AdMob to contend with too. The same AdMob that terminated my Google Play account for spurious reasons. I say spurious, as I can rattle off hundreds of quizzes that are in violation of AdMob policies that are sill on Google Play. I give up!

Sigh.

kakula · February 16, 2022, 12:59pm

Hi Scott,

I truly thank and admire everyone who is involved with Solar2D, and sorry to waste your times with those posts, and I’m sure you can’t do anything more to make things simpler for us, but you see this is one of our problems as developers

works with the newest iOS and Android

it is not easy to detect which devices will work and which won’t

Another severe problem I faced is with:

system.getInfo( "deviceID" )

I used this in almost every app I develop, and recently it changed and it requires permissions, and it works for some devices and does not work for others, this is of course Google problem not solar2d
but imagine now that each app I create an update for will crash because of one of the simplest methods of system object

actually one of my apps (a social app called bond) got very low rating because of this problem, and people started to leave the app, although it was working for half of the people, and I thought they were stupid users, but I figured out the problem by accident when I downloaded the app for a friend on a newer phone and i was shocked and spent hours to eventually know that it was caused by system.getInfo( “deviceID” )

Scott_Harrison · February 16, 2022, 7:04pm

First the moreInfo plugin ~= system.getInfo

Second, says marketplace listing" Platforms: iOS 10 / Android 5" implying iOS 10-15.x and Android 5-12.x

I test my plugins on the most popular devices, I don’t really want to get into the debate on Apple and Android making changes that break old apps. Doing the best I can support new the changes from Apple, Google,etc

XeduR · February 16, 2022, 7:32pm

iOS 14 and 15 account for ~93% of iOS users since January 2022. I would expect iOS 10, 11, 12 and 13 would account for the remaining ~7%, leaving non-supported iOS devices to account for a fraction of a percentage and likely belonging to users who wouldn’t use App Store anyway. I’d expect the usage for Android 4.4.4 and lower (i.e. non-supported devices) is somewhere in the same range.

As for system.getInfo("deviceID"), if I’m not mistaken, that change isn’t particularly new, but there are differences across Android versions. If you check out the docs, the API will behave very differently depending on whether you have permission to read phone state or not. More recently, however, Google added an extra hoop to jump through for Android 10+ devices where you now have to declare the permission to read phone state in your app’s manifest.

TLDR: that API shouldn’t be used alone in trying to identify users.

troylyndon · February 18, 2022, 6:50pm

@Scott_Harrison @XeduR @kakula

RE: system.getInfo(“deviceID”) - is it unreliable and crashing on some Android devices? Online, I found a comment regarding Android: “getDeviceId()” has been deprecated since API level 26. Is this the same issue?

What does Solar2D return for system.getInfo(“deviceID”) for Android 10, 11 & 12? It seems to be working without crashing for me; although I do see a handful of unexplained ANRs and Crashes. Oddly, my % is 0.21%, which happens to be identical to ‘peers medium’, making me think all developers are having issue with the same devices.

Does Scott’s more info plugin solve this issue? btw, where is that plugin? I can’t find it at: https://solar2dmarketplace.com

Scott_Harrison · February 18, 2022, 11:51pm

I don’t have a deviceId alternative in moreInfo

But here is the link
https://solar2dmarketplace.com/plugins?MoreInfo_tech-scotth

XeduR · February 19, 2022, 3:21am

It doesn’t crash and even though it’s been deprecated, it does still work.

The thing about it being unreliable is that there was a time when you could call that and you’d be guaranteed to get the same ID on the same device, but there have been many privacy related changes and you can’t trust the device IDs to be unique anymore or that they won’t change between re-installs or even between launches in some cases (as they are prone to change over time).

kakula · February 19, 2022, 9:26pm

I will tell you what happened in my case.

I used to have a social app which did not require any registration or authentication, it only captured your device ID, and the rest is on you to fill like age height weight … etc.

When system.getInfo(“deviceID”) changed, I followed the links and modified permissions etc.
it worked, but like Xedure said, device ID sometimes returns different values for certain devices, and sometimes it returns nil or "" so I simply stopped using it

SO WHAT CRASHED MY APP really was concatenating the returned nil value with another string because I wasn’t expecting it to be nil, and didn’t use an IF Statement for that, and since it is not a Globally unique ID I decided never to use it again