I've made an app that using google play games services. I'm looking at the developers console now, and I see two tabs...
The top one is Applications and the one below it is Games Services. It seems that I can fill out both and publish both. I don't want to make any rash decisions before I know what these do exactly. Can some one help me out.
The Applications tab is for publishing apps/games (using apk files) to Android. These will show up in the Play store.
The Games Services is for configuring your Games Services for all platforms - this includes achievements, leaderboards, etc. These are done separately from the Android app because the same information can be used for multiple platforms, so your Android, iOS, and web versions share the exact same achievements, leaderboards, etc.
This means that for an Android app you will need to complete both of these sections and publish them. However, you can also setup the Games Services only and link them to, for example, a web app, without creating a matching entry in Applications.
Related
I am developing a small word game as a side project and chose Flutter to release the game for both Android and iOS. I am able to use flutter packages (e.g. https://pub.dev/packages/games_services) to integrate with Google Play Games and Apple Game Kit but I think this doesn't allow e.g. to create a cross platform leaderboard, but iOS and Android players see their separate scores.
Options I found:
Use Google Play Service, also for Apple users (seems to have some issues though and not work for iOS users seamlessly)
I have looked at quite some smaller games that are using their own leaderboard implementations and have seen some small projects that implement one with Flutter and Firebase (e.g. https://github.com/fateh491989/leaderboard).
I also found 2 other leaderboard services (https://github.com/omgwtfgames/omgleaderboards and https://leaderboards.io), not sure what the advantage is of those vs using firebase.
Before I go down the route of creating a simple scoring / leader board using fire base, I was hoping to find someone here who looked into this as well. Is there a way to use the Google and Apple services, yet see stats x-platforms? I would prefer this, also hoping to give users a more integrated experience and maybe also gaining new users through this.
Thanks for any pointers.
I have an Android app with many games in it. I would like for each game to only be downloaded if the user wants to play that specific game, rather than having one giant APK file with all the games. Is it possible to utilize Android's dynamic delivery functionality without having the app on the Google Play Store? If so, how?
Considering that dynamic delivery operates by calling APIs in the Play Core Library, I don't think this is an option.
I have a app created in xamarin forms, I already know how to create the APK, the app is to be used internally, i dont want to publish to the appstore, how can the app be update when is available a new version ?
Depending on your resources at hand and requirements, you have a couple of options. These options include, but are certainly not limited to:
Visual Studio Mobile Center (link): probably the most obvious choice. Out of the box support for Xamarin, and 'just works'. You can set up different groups of users, add analytics and crash reporting, etc. In the future you might be able to take your configuration to its big brother: VSTS. But beware! The product is in preview right now. Preview in Microsoft-land means free for now, but doesn't have to be in the future. While I expect it not to cost much/anything for basic functionality, it is something to be aware of. Not sure on this, but I think you need to invite your users by hand, so you have to know who you want to invite.
Google Play Store (link): It's kind of a mis-use, but you could of course leverage the Google Play Stores capabilites for Alpha/Beta testing. Also here you have the ability to create groups and have some basic reporting options. In terms of delivering your app you have some nice options here like A/B testing and unlike Mobile Center (again, I didn't verify this) you can setup a link with which people can enroll themselves. Depending on your needs, this might be nice. In terms of costs, this will set you back 25 dollars once. And you could develop and distribute other apps if you'd like.
Manual: send the APK file manually or hosting it on a shared location. I would prefer this least of all. People are not notified of any updates and you don't have any insights apart from something you might have incorporated in your app. Also you don't have any control over who installs or sees the app, etc.
But of course the prefered way would be to do it through the Google Play enterprise program. See this website. This provides you and your end-users with a private app store basically. Or as they say:
A managed version of Google Play is used by enterprises and their employees to access a rich ecosystem of work and productivity apps.
You can have private apps, only available for your targeted audience and still leverage the power of the Google Play store. The experience for your end-users will be unified with the regular app store.
I couldn't find a straight answer, but it seems the private apps will also cost just 25 dollars once and is included in the regular Play Store developer license.
You have a good way to do that : Use Beta this a service provided by Fabric, you can upload your app with different versions and get access to different teams in your company. It's easy to use and quick to manage.
Hope it helps.
You have multiple options at your hand:
use Bitrise or Visual Studio Mobile Center (aka HockeyApp) to build and provide a downloadable version of you app
in addiont to Bitrise or VS Mobile Center you can set up your own store. Take a look at Relution for example
build locally on your machine and push it to:
a fileshare
an FTP-site
the user by mail.
I am about to integrate my Android game with GP Game Services, and was wondering if there are any tools for separating data generated during testing from actual players' data. For example, I do not want my achievements/leaderboard scores that belong to my testing accounts to show up at all in production.
What is the usual approach here, what kind of tools do I have? I did not anything useful so far, which suggests I have to live with the problem. Alternatively I could create another game (for testing) on the Play console, use that for testing, while the production APK would use the 'normal' game... any suggestions?
You can use the Play Games Services Managment Tools to do that.
The following is possible using this tool (as specified on the linked site):
Reset, show, hide, and unlock Achievements
Perform administration on Leaderboards such as hiding players
Test and administrate Events and Quests
Inspect Snapshot data
I have a pretty complex project, it uses a lot of custom views and image manipulation.
I want to have in it 2 type of in app purchases, one for Google Play and one for Amazon.
I want to be able to easily maintain code for both, so from what I see I have some options:
I can add both apis on the app and have a flag, based on which, when I build the APK I enable one or the other. Is Google Play sensing if I add Amazon API in the app ? Could this be a problem when uploading the apk ?
I can make the main project as a library project and then create two new projects which are using it. One for Google Play and one for Amazon. All changes will be made in the library project so code is easily maintainable
I can have two separate projects one for Google Play and one for Amazon. In this case it might be pretty hard to keep track of changes, but doable.
Which approach would be better and why ?
Go for the first option.
If the app you uploaded to Google Play uses Google Play for in-app billing, then you have no issues whatsoever, even if there is coding and permissions etc. for Amazon payment inside the app. Google doesn't analysis this. And event if they would, you are on the save side, as you only use Google Play's in-app billing.
You can even improve this option by using Android Studio and Gradle build. It allows to package only those artefacts, that you need for certain build variant. In your case, you can have a single version of project and configure Gradle in a way, that it creates two apk-files: one for Google Play and one for Amazon with respective payment logic in them.