There has to be some point in your Android gaming career where you come across the message “This app is incompatible with your [place device name].” This can be a major downer especially if the said game was one that you looked forward to playing weeks before it eventually got released.
Assuming you have a fairly decent and not-too-old hardware on your phone/tablet and you know it for a fact that the game would run just fine anyway, what do you do? This issue about device incompatibility is exacerbated these days with games released on specific chipsets (like Tegra 3 games).
Let me share some personal experience with regards to this topic. I have a Tegra 3 tablet. This is by all accounts a fairly decent piece of hardware that should run all of today’s games without a problem.
I remember being teased by Gameloft about N.O.V.A. 3 back in April, and I saw a lot of promise in the game. But you know what? On release day, when I went to Google Play to purchase the game, it gave the dreaded “This app is incompatible with your Acer A510” message. This was the first time a game I really wanted to play was incompatible with my device.
After doing some research, I found out Gameloft was (and still is) Tegra 3-unfriendly. So I had to take matters into my own hands and look for the game elsewhere (you know where) when it was clear that I won’t officially get it on Google Play. And you know what? The game ran fine on my tablet. There were lots of bugs, but that afflicted the whole Android user base so wasn’t just specific to my device.
I had to do similar things for Mass Effect: Infiltrator and Asphalt 7: Heat. Getting them unofficially isn’t really easy either, and then there’s the risk of getting malware into your device. But these were games that as mentioned before, I badly wanted to play so it was worth the extra effort and risk.
I hand it over to you now. What would you do if you find yourself in a similar position? What are your thoughts on this matter? Do participate in the poll and elaborate further in the comments section.
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