Super Hexagon: An example of why you shouldn't ignore Android

It isn't really worth launching your mobile game for Android. Thanks to fragmentation and piracy, the Google Play store is a minefield -- you might as well stick to iOS. That's what some developers believe, and Android is regularly snubbed in favor of an iOS-only release, even at a time when the number of Android devices out there is surging rapidly. Terry Cavanagh launched Super Hexagon on iOS several months ago, and sold more than 10,000 copies in its first three days on sale on Apple's App Store. Since then he's been slowly but surely, piecing together an Android version, with hardware fragmentation issues holding it back consistently. But Cavanagh battled through all of this, and finally released the game via the Google Play store earlier this week. And to his surprise, it was most definitely worth the effort -- the game has now sold more than 25,000 copies on Android in just the first four days on sale, easily besting the initial days of the iOS version. "I'd heard from other developers that Android is a much smaller market than iOS, so yeah, its success has been quite a surprise!" he tells us. "It's not really fair to make a direct comparison, because nobody had heard of the game when it launched on iOS - but so far, the Android launch has been bigger than the iOS launch, which I would never have expected." [Don't miss: How Vector Unit made the leap from console to mobile games] Anyone who follows Cavanagh on Twitter will know that he's had numerous problems with getting Super Hexagon to play nicely on every Android device, with the Google Nexus 7 tablet in particular causing such deep problems that he was eventually forced to say that the device would be incompatible with the game. "I think developing for Android is basically a lot like developing for PC," he notes. "Even if you can get things working nicely on 99 percent of devices out there, there's still a good possibility you'll encounter problems with odd devices, just because of how many different types of Androids are out there." Yet despite these issues, the VVVVVV developer hasn't been put off the platform. "It hasn't been too bad though, considering," he adds. "We've already managed to fix most of the main device specific issues since launching a few days ago." As for Cavanagh's mobile future, there's no doubt in his mind that he'll be aiming for both iOS and Android releases for his next games. "I think it was well worth the effort," he says. "I'll definitely be bringing any future mobile games I make to Android."