Case Study: Device Compatibility & Google Play Settings

Without question, my favorite thing about the gaming community is the camaraderie with colleagues. It’s no secret that game developers of every level are often the real superfans of other independent game studios. 

 

A great deal of the gaming community lives and breathes with this type of thought-sharing, feedback, and help. Every week, we receive questions from new friends and old, ranging from shared opportunities and game design feedback to troubleshooting and technical issues. Taking the more common, and thematic questions, and reusing them as blogs feels like a natural step for us, and broadens the number of developers we can assist. 

 

The mini-case study below helps with a very small, but recurring issue that first game studios and game developers sometimes run into issues with: device compatibility settings.

 

It’s often the case with beginners who are managing a store upload for the first time to miss a few steps. One of the most common is by not correctly configuring the Device catalog.

 

If you look at the example below, you’ll see 15K+ devices supported from a project one of our senior developers uploaded.

 

 

Here, you’ll see a similar project in the same month, and same version of Unity:

 

 

With just under 5K devices supported, only 30% of the comparable above, something is wrong.

 

In this case, the Game App API level is set to 23+. This means that Android devices must have that level of update to ensure compatibility, download, and play the game app.

 

 

If you look at the package configured by the senior dev, you’ll see the difference:

 

 

Set the minimum API level to 19 within Unity Player Settings, and you are good to go. 

 

 

This confusion often starts because the Google Play upload dashboard will say that it requires the most recent API level to be uploaded. You do not have to set the minimum API level to be the latest.