Probably one of the greatest reasons for which the Android platform is still fighting for market shares with Apple is the fact that the Apple App Store still has a lot more apps than the Android Market. Despite that, the gap between the two platforms is slowly but surely dwindling away and this has been the case thanks largely to the ease with which developers can add applications to the Android Market. As more tools become available for developers to release titles for the platform, the more high quality titles we get on the Android Market.
The latest development towards showing off the power of Android smartphones was with the T-Mobile LG G2X ( Optimus 2X at the time ) running the Epic Citadel tech demo a while back. The device wasn’t only running the tech demo from Epic Games, but it was also pushing to a large screen TV via HDMI. Despite not being optimized to do so, the device has no problems in running it both on itself as well as on the TV in mirroring mode.
LG Optimus 2X
One of the reasons for which this is so highly acclaimed is the fact that the engine powers titles like Infinity Blade or Dungeon Defenders, so the fact that the LG Optimus 2X can easily run the tech demo proves that even top of the notch titles can run on Android smartphones.
This somewhat relates to the interview which Slowdown.vg did with Jay Wilbur, the Vice President of Epic Games, when discussing about developing titles for Android as well as iOS. He claimed that the largest issue of the platform was still the fragmentation of the OS versions running on it, yet this is slowly dwindling away thanks to some very clever and powerful APIs developed by Google.
Check out the T-Mobile LG G2X running Unreal Engine 3:
Despite saying that Android still has its issues, he did show off a Samsung Galaxy S running the Epic Citadel tech demo, which is so much more impressive, as the LG Optimus 2X is a top of the notch Android smartphone with its dual-core processor. The fact that Epic Citadel could be powered even on the 1 GHz Hummingbird Samsung Galaxy S its clear to see that the platform has the horse power it needs to power the titles made with the engine, yet we are still a rather long way away from seeing more titles on it.
In any case, fret not, as more and more developers are jumping aboard the Android bandwagon and I would say that it’s only a matter of time until the Android OS catches up with iOS from this standpoint. Stay tuned for more!
