Simply Solitaire HD released on Android – It’s Huge
January 19, 2011
Weighing in at an incredibly hefty 44.38MB YoYo Games have published their first Android title.
As of a couple of hours ago Simply Solitaire HD has been available as a free download from the Android Marketplace. The App Settings do not allow users to move the game from internal phone memory to storage on an SD Card.
By comparison the iPad version of Simply Solitare HD is just 4.45MB.
[…] available at the considerably smaller file size of just 4.11MB Simply Solitaire HD is the first game created in Game Maker to be […]
I downloaded the bigger version via wifi this morning, then smaller one via 3G through an update this afternoon. It works really well on my HTC Desire and I actually completed a round ! 🙂
We are still working on performance issues just now on some handsets, so let me know how you get on with your handset, we are still optimizing the code and finessing things.
Well the application was only 22Mb – we had copy protection switched on from Google Marketplace – this doubled the size (and also prevented the SD card copy) – neither of which was effectively documented.
We also removed some graphics (duplicates and old graphics that were no longer used) – this reduced the number of textures from 5 to 4.
We added simple compression to the textures that brought the size down from 4Mb (yes they were RAW) down to 0.5Mb(ish).
Much better, thank you 🙂
It downloaded and moved to SD card fine. When I’ve had a chance to play it I will get a review up.
> we had copy protection switched on from Google Marketplace
Please don’t use that trash. It’s deprecated and can also cause your app to not to show up on phones with firmware versions that have not been “authorized” by Google. It’s also completely useless, since a rooted phone is all you need to circumvent it.
44MB -> 4mb.
Dat RAW format, right?
New version uploaded, we dramatically reduced the size of the application, a combination of better compression and removed some unused graphics.
Also should allow you to copy to SD card now – let us know if that does not happen.
should be down to 4Mb now.
The other 40 MB is empty legal threats.
App size is 22Mb not 44Mb so not sure why that is being reported incorrectly – I need to find that out.
Currently textures are not compressed but we will add that soon (more tricky on Android as not all platforms have the same compression options).
Thanks Russell. I have 22MB of space but it won’t download presumably because the phone is checking space availability against the 44MB figure.
22MB is still absolutely massive for a small and simple app such as Solitaire. Hopefully after you add compression it jumps below 5-10mb like an app of that complexity should be. Although I don’t know how large most android apps are, I’m speaking based off iPhone apps which should be similar.
Top free games in Android Marketplace currently:
Angry Birds – 14.14MB
Solitaire (not YYG) – 83.37KB !!
Jewels – 1.92MB
Angry Birds Seasons – 12.28MB
Live Holdem Poker – 3.55MB
Paper Toss – 5.92MB
Bubble Blaster – 458KB
Unblock Me Free – 1.08MB
Have you tried to reach out to YYG on why this version is so much bigger? Even without the iOS version to compare, that’s still pretty massive for a solitaire game.
I dropped Andrew a message earlier and go no response, will Twitter Mike now.
I’m not even sure if this was meant to be released publicly. It doesn’t appear at store.yoyogames.com and I hadn’t heard any word that this was coming until it appeared in the Android Marketplace.
The file size is absolutely ridiculous. It is the largest Android app by far I have ever wanted to download. The madness is even more so given that the app settings do not allow it to be moved to an SD card. I don’t have enough free internal storage space on my relatively new Android phone to even download this.