Fractal Live Generator - Live wallpaper for Android

In my previous post I had mentioned that I was working on an Android app to be released soon. I have since released my first Android app to the market place. This app is called Fractal Live Generator and it is a live wallpaper for generating animated Mandelbrot and Julia sets.

You can download it from the Google Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrissteinberg.fractalwallpaper

And for some pretty pictures:

To test the waters of Android development I wanted something fairly simple and non-expensive to develop so that I could get an understanding of the publishing path for the Android market place. I felt that a live wallpaper would both be fun and straightforward to develop. I was right on both accounts. Doing a fractal generation application in OpenGL 2.0 was something I had planned on writing for a while regardless, but the excuse to put it on my Nexus 7 was too great. The biggest issue I ran into was determining what customizable features to add to the initial release and to keep feature creep down to a minimal to actually get the app released.

The actual process to release an app on the Google Play store was surprisingly simple. Once I had done a little research to determine what was required and what I was agreeing to in all of the legal documentation, actually producing the release apk and uploading it to the store was much easier than I expected. The major pitfall that I did run into was not being able to test on multiple devices since I only have the Nexus 7. It turns out that this is an issue as there have been multiple reports of people's devices not rendering correctly. Until I can get my hands on one of these devices that are not working properly, I simply have to accept that there will be people currently who cannot use my software. This was a valuable lesson to learn early however, as I now know that for future Android applications that the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard is not implemented or supported the same on all devices. It is much cheaper to have issues like this on a free app that I only spent a few weeks of spare time developing than in an app that I potentially have invested money to develop and months of effort into producing. I will have to invest in larger ranges of devices for testing and budget accordingly.

I do plan on doing some more live wallpapers as I think that the wallpaper is a great canvas to make some eye candy shader toys. It is also a great way to experiment with OpenGL ES 2.0 GLSL shaders in the mobile space. So definitely keep an eye out for more of these types of things from me.