For those who believe in tl;dr (Too long, didn't read), here's the blog in a nutroll: Try not to release your iPhone app before testing the release candidate on the most popular devices even if you don't own them, and Unity 3.0 developers should be aware of potential rendering issues.
Perhaps the most exciting e-mail I've received in the recent past is the one from Apple informing me that Tiltz was released. After scrambling to get the official website up, I waited for the ratings, reviews, and hopefully purchases to begin trickling in.
New apps get a fair amount of exposure on the App Store...which unfortunately was a negative. In the first day, Tiltz was left with an average rating of 1.5 out of 5 stars. I was awestruck...what happened!? Then a friend showed me what happened on his iPhone 4: The game ran super slow! "Impossible" I thought, it runs fine on my 3GS! It's a lightweight app too; how could a bunch of marbles and boxes run at less than 10 FPS on an iPhone 4? My first Google search was "unity 3 iphone 4 slow". The first hit was:
After glazing through the posts, I found one that suggested changing
#define USE_OPENGLES20_IF_AVAILABLE 1
in Application.mm to
#define USE_OPENGLES20_IF_AVAILABLE 0
...and the performance went back up to 30 fps (which is the norm as far as I know). I know it worked because two of my friends graciously let me use their iPhone 4's as guinea pigs.
Following that, I made the decision to take the app off the store. In its current form, it's simply not fit for release. I also submitted a patch to Apple, which days later, is still set to "Waiting for Review." With Thanksgiving coming up, I don't expect it to be back up for at least another week.
I just hope that my next deployment is met with more success. There will certainly be features to add and lesser bugs to fix, but this was really a sucker punch that I won't let my guard down for again.
