What’s the size of the music/graphics/game code/stuff that is needed for any app to run on Android?
I believe (without knowing for sure) that you could make a similar game much smaller by “rendering” the music and some of the graphics.
“rendering” the music and some of the graphics.
I think that’s what’s called procedural audio/graphics. For audio, it’s like building synthesizers into the game, to then be able to play the music/fx as a program (sort of like sheet music) instead of an audio file.
Super Mario Bros on the NES came in at 31 kB, and it was a bit more of a game. 100 kB for Flappy Bird isn’t all that impressive.
Having to support one type of device allows for a lot more optimisation than supporting thousands
Android has a massive built-in library of supporting functions that abstracts away most of the differences between devices, including support libraries for older versions of Android, and Flappy Bird is almost the “hello world” of gamws writing.
Buddy super mario bros was coded in 6502 assembly and required the devs to use every data saving trick in the book like metasprites, sprite flicker, tilesets, color pallets, etc.
Android apps can be notoriously overhead bloat from Java, so for the modern age this is decently impressive.
