What the heck is a medium sized update? I can’t really call it a major update, but it’s got more changes than the previous updates 
This was prompted by a combination of things – Just Reboot’s review where he reported that the game was crashing for him, and Amazon rejecting the updated version for the same reason – crashes. I hadn’t really been paying much attention to BugSense, but that prompted me to take a closer look. I was getting over 200 crashes a day – that’s way too much. So I started working on the most frequently occurring errors, and also started a discussion with Just Reboot’s deidein, getting his feedback on what he thought could be improved. I haven’t implemented everything he pointed out, but they were all good suggestions.
Here are the main changes:
- Swarm is now optional. If you’ve already signed up, the game automatically logs you in. If you haven’t signed up, the game asks you if you want to sign up. If you select ‘no’, you’ll never see the Swarm login prompt again. This isn’t permanent, you can always pull up Swarm by clicking on the button in the main menu. I think this makes for a better overall user experience
- Reduced the frequency with which ads are fetched, and re-enabled the random control I had originally built in for the interstitial ads. The first should hopefully help with CTR (I’ll have to keep an eye on that, I know impressions will go down, but hopefully CTR will go up). The second change will reduce the number of ads shown to users. Better user experience, may or may not be bad for revenue. I’ll see. Someone might notice an ad more if it comes up when they’re not expecting it?
- Fixed the GSON issue that seems specific to HTC phones. Based on putting 2 and 2 together from my Flurry and BugSense data, I think this is what caused Amazon to reject the game
- Fixed a fragment shader performance problem that was basically just me not having any clue what I’m doing when it comes to programming OpenGL shaders. The new version should run smoother on pretty much all phones
If you’ve installed the game, I would recommend updating to this version. It’s live on the Google Play store, I’ll be updating the other stores soon.