There’s a small problem with Phoney Girlfriend. It’s a small problem now, but it’s going to become a bigger problem as we add girls into the game. Each character in Phoney Girlfriend is made up of a script, some pictures and some audio files. Right now we have two characters in the game, and their assets combined take up 13.69 MB. Which means each girl takes up about 7 MB
So what’s the problem? As we add girls to the game, the package size increases. Right now we’re just smashing all the assets into the APK file, once it gets over 50 MB we run into problem number one.
APKs can’t be larger than 50 MB
Shit! So once they get above 50 MB. It’s pretty hard acquiring pictures, voice messages and scripts as it is. So it could be quite a while until we get over the 50 MB limit, but it’s approaching.
Alright fine, so the APK can’t be larger than 50 MB, but you can have two expansion files that can be 2 GBs each. That’s great, so that’s the solution right? No because there’s another problem.
People hate downloading large files
Let’s imagine a scenario where there’s one hundred characters in the app, we use APK expansion files to get around the 50 MB APK limit.
100 characters * 7MB = 700 MB
These APK expansion files are stored on Google Play and they are included in the file size on the store listing. If you see an app on the store that’s 700 MB you are not going to download it. We haven’t figured out how much free content we are going to produce, but chances are the majority of content is going to be locked. So when you download the app you’re downloading content you may never get to use.
Different APKs for different characters?
So we make a different package for every character, paid characters are paid apps, free characters are free apps. This is a terrible solution for many reasons. If we had ten characters we’d have to make ten APKs. When we fix a bug, we have to upload ten packages for that fix. There are other problems, but let’s not list them.
Free content in the APK, paid content downloaded from a server
This is a pretty good solution, and probably what we will end up doing. Unless someone can think of a better idea. Let’s say there’s three free characters, and twenty paid characters. The pictures and voice messages for the free characters will be in the APK. When a person pays for locked content, the app connects to our server and downloads the content for that character.
This presents a few problems though. We have to create some sort of web server to feed android phones with fake girlfriends. I don’t know how to do that, but I guess I can figure it out, and I think Hubert knows how to do it.
Another problem is we have to start paying for web hosting. Noooo… actually I’m already paying for web hosting for this blog. Maybe I can use this server. Don’t know. I think we’ll also have to do some security related stuff to prevent people from stealing fake girlfriends from our server, but we’ll probably only do that if we notice a huge discrepancy between the number of server requests we get, and the number of sales we have. For example if Google Play says we have cleared 200 transactions, but our server has handed out 2000 fake girlfriends, then something is up.