Popcap’s Peggle – How not to make an Android App
I installed Amazon’s Appstore on my phone, an application that offers a free download of a “paid” app each day. Today, the free app is “Peggle” by internet gaming giant Popcap. I’m not a big gamer, but I thought I’d check it out mostly for research purposes. I’m looking to get into Android development myself, and I thought I could learn something from a company like Popcap.
And I did learn something – namely, I learned exactly how NOT to make a phone-based application.
I started the download and it seemed to be taking forever. It was only then that I noticed that the download was nearly 80MB. 80MB for a phone app? Seriously? That’s about half the size of the entire Android operating system!
I wanted to abort the download, but Amazon’s app store provides no way to cancel a download once it’s started.
Also, once downloaded, Amazon’s App store offers no way to delete the file without installing it first. So here I have 80MB stored somewhere on my phone, and the application gives me no way to free up that space.
I poked around and little and found the downloaded file located at /mnt/sdcard/Android/data/com.amazon.venezia/cache.
—-rwxr-x system sdcard_rw 77724360 2011-06-21 12:12 vnz49829.apk
All 80 Megs of it.
I opened up the file to see how they managed to use 80 MB of data, and found the following.
- 14 MP3 files taking up 21 MB of space.
- A 6 MB file called Peggle.dz that contains a bunch of WAV files and some data files
- A 49 MB file called Peggle.480×320.dz that contains mostly graphics. png, jpg, gif, they’re all in the there.
So there you have it – 76 MB of this 78 MB download consist of images and sound files. And that’s exactly how you DON’T make an app for a phone.
July 5th, 2011 at 8:27 pm
It works fine off the SD card. No issues after the initial download, that is if you know how to manage storage.
July 5th, 2011 at 10:47 pm
True, John, it does run from the SD card. And I have to admit, I’m a bit addicted to Peggle. It’s a very good game.
Still, I stand by my initial criticisms, which are 1) the mp3 files are way bigger than they need to be and 2) the graphics files are way bigger than they need to be.
Most people don’t know how to manage their phone’s storage. I do, but most don’t. I think it’s bad/lazy programming to create an app that consumes 70 MB when you could have done the exact same thing in, say, 7 MB.
These mp3 files aren’t exactly the latest Lady Gaga release, they’re simple repeating MIDI-esque files. And the graphics aren’t Ansel Adams photos.
November 27th, 2011 at 5:06 pm
EVERYTHING PopCap produces for Android is horrifically bloated. Their smallest game is Chuzzle, which at 28 MB, is bigger than about 98% of the apps I have for Android. Bejeweled weighs in at a massive 44 MB (which is utterly obscene for a simple jewel swap game). Plants vs. Zombies is almost as obese as Peggle at 75 MB.