Rovio's Angry Birds won't fly on slow Android devices

Rovio recently brought Angry Birds to the Android platform, but the popular (and oddly addictive) physics game is suffering performance problems on certain handsets with slow processors. In a blog entry published on Thursday, the company announced plans for a new “lightweight” version that will work better on legacy hardware.

The need for two separate versions of Angry Birds on Android looks a lot like a symptom of platform fragmentation, but it is actually a consequence of hardware fragmentation. The handsets that can’t run Angry Birds all have relatively weak CPUs, many clocked at 528mhz. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the T-Mobile G1 and other first generation Android phones can’t run the latest computationally-intensive Android games, but there are also a few relatively recent handsets that also landed on Rovio’s list of bad birds.

For example, one of the phones on which Angry Birds is unsupported is the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini, which launched in June and has a 600Mhz processor. There are also some less significant performance issues on a number of recent mid-range Samsung devices that launched with 800Mhz processors. The current generation of high-end Android phones, which are mostly equipped with 1Ghz processors, can run Angry Birds without difficulty.

Rovio says that it wanted to avoid having to maintain multiple versions of the game for Android, but they eventually determined that it was the only way to reach all of the potential users. The new “light” version will still have all of the game’s levels, but it will be optimized to work properly on handsets with slower processors.

“So far, we have hesitated to create multiple versions of Angry Birds for the Android platform,” the company wrote. “But judging by the feedback we have received, we feel that by providing a lightweight solution, we are doing a favour for our fans.”

Platform fragmentation generally refers to vendor-specific platform customizations that degrade compatibility. As we have discussed in previous articles, that phenomenon is largely non-existent on Android, with the exception of rare forks like the one maintained by the Chinese mobile industry. That kind of fragmentation has played no role in the problems experienced by some users of Angry Birds. Instead, it’s an issue of hardware diversity.

Although it’s not software fragmentation in the traditional sense, it still poses some challenges for developers. As Android starts creeping down to more mid-range phones, the spread between the hardware capabilities of individual handsets could become a bigger issue.

The Android compatibility specification mandates a touchscreen, so it’s not likely that we will see Android on cheap flip feature phones in the immediate future. But it wouldn’t be all that surprising if Android started showing up on a lot of cheap handsets, including some that are intended to be used without data contracts (the compatibility spec requires connectivity, but that requirement can be fulfilled with WiFi support).

Regardless of whether this issue can be properly characterized as fragmentation, it poses similar challenges for developers who are building computationally intensive applications. Android may need more fine-grained ways for applications to specify their minimal hardware requirements.