IOS8 update rates, Unity web player lock on Chrome and new Puzzle & Dragons records - and other news of the week for a mobile developer

iOS8 is installed on 52% of devices

According to the official data provided by Apple, the new version of iOS is installed on 52% of devices, we recall that the release of version 8.1 recently took place, which introduced the Apple Pay service for device owners that are being attacked from all sides by large retail companies in the US, such as: WalMart, Kmart , Target.

The event has already been dubbed as the “Battle of the Titans”, recalling wars such as “VHS vs Betamax”, and passions will only flare up.
And what can we say 52% of devices on iOS8? We can safely say that the new operating system is the slowest distribution version of Apple’s mobile OS. According to Mixpanel, the previous OS version — iOS 7 — took only five days to reach 54% penetration.

The new version of Apple's OS is accompanied by a number of failures - these are “glitches” of smartphones, and poor performance on old devices, and hastily made patches; something similar was happening on the launch.
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Apple needs to try hard to accelerate the process of penetration of the new version, but it will be extremely difficult to do in view of the fact that now Apple needs to promote its new Apple Pay service by all means, to which the main efforts will be directed.

The future of Web publishing in Unity: Answers to burning and uncomfortable questions

The Uniteck team was overwhelmed with developer questions about disabling the Unity plug-in for the Google Chrome browser, which now accounts for almost 60%, according to w3schools.com. It is therefore not surprising that developers who create web applications, for example for social networks, are so concerned. Below is a free translation of the response from the Unity team.

At the end of 2013, Google announced that their plans were to disable the ability to execute external native code (NPAPI), through which the Unity web player worked, like many extensions from other developers. The unit team did not have accurate information when Google deactivates NPAPI support, but sooner or later it should happen.

We know that many developers create games for Unity Web player, and because of this, you have enough bread and butter and some more ... The Unity team continues to support the web player and promises to keep developers up to date with all the events associated with it. Recently, the player began to support new 64-bit versions of browsers: IE 11 64 and Chrome 64 bit for Windows. On the approach of Unity Web Player 64 bit for OS X, which will work in Chrome 64 OS X.

We are aware that the launch of native code in the browser will not be soon, too many plug-ins have appeared, and not all of them work well and provide the required level of security.
And as a result, we work hard to complete the Unity 5 for WebGL . We believe that this is the best, safe and successful long-term solution for running games in the browser. The release of games under WebGL for Unity 5 will be free and will allow users to play without installing any additional plug-ins.

We work with browser manufacturers to improve the performance of games on WebGL. The current results look very promising, in some cases the WebGL solution runs as fast as the native code.

You can read more about Unity WebGL benchmarking in this post . You can also try Unity 5 Beta , which has recently become available. As soon as Unity 5 will be released, the WebGL build will be available to all Unity developers for free.

From the KamaGames team. We recommend reading this article , where the cases of those who have already taken care of the premature solution of the problem are considered. In short: it is recommended to do a landing with a request to enter the game under a different browser.

Mobile games accounted for 12% of EA revenue

EA provided a financial report for the 2nd quarter of fiscal year 2015 ended September 30, 2014.

The company's profit during the reporting period amounted to $ 990 million and increased by 42% over the same period last year. 51% of this amount comes from the sale of digital goods.

Net income was $ 3 million, compared with a loss of $ 237 million 12 months ago.

EA's mobile division earned a profit of $ 123 million, up 64% over the same period last year. This represents just over 12% of total profits, and is in the expected range of 10-12%, as was the case in past intervals.

Puzzle & Dragons creators reported record sales and purchased a gaming mobile network.

The Japanese company GungHo Online Entertainment, the authors of Puzzle & Dragons, last week did not allow to be bored and announced at once two news that you need to pay attention to.

First, the company told about the record numbers for the first 3 quarters of this year. The company's revenue from January to September inclusive amounted to $ 1.22 billion, which is 14.3% more than last year. In other words, GungHo earns about $ 4.5 million per day!

Consolidated profit for the period reached $ 680 million. As a result, the company's margin is more than 50%. These figures in the market now, few can boast.

Secondly, the company bought 70% of the Playphone mobile social gaming network, the main audience of which is in the United States.

The reasons for buying are obvious. The company still wants to be more serious for players in North America, the Middle East and Asian countries. This step will allow her to attract even more users.

Advertisers buy engines, where the world is heading?

The expression “advertising is the engine of commerce”, which has already become a bitchy, is applicable with some changes to mobile applications, where advertising also plays an important role. Recently, in mobile development, we have already seen an example of the fusion of developers of engines and developers of tools for selling advertising: in the case of Unity, the developers of the 3D engine, in the wake of success, bought Applifter.

But Corona Labs is not doing so well (perhaps they are familiar to you with their Corona SDK - a fairly well-known cross-platform 2D engine for mobile development), and Fuse Powered , in turn, is acquired by a company that has been sharpened for mobile monetization and advertising ( their main products are AdRally and FuseBoxx).

There is an assumption that for closed SDKs this is a natural way of development, everyone needs advertising, and it’s not a bad idea to get such an opportunity for a single supplier. Well, let's see what happens next.