[Android Apps and Games] Padkite:
Hi guys,

Its a very exciting post, I am happy to see that the product is opening the debate. I appreciate both good and constructive feedback's, we are working on solving the implementation problems and on a new release. We really apologize for the inconveniences.

We haven't given up, at all, we are working on it. We are confident about the concept, potential and future vision. We took an enormous challenge and we are in the process of overcoming it, if it would have been something simple we would have launched long ago. We need your help, below you can find instructions how you can help us building a library to your cellphone.

PadKite is alive and development continues. We are making a great effort to overcome the crashes problem and in the meantime we are developing the launching release that will include a single finger interaction and more user friendly features, app rocks. We are also mitigating the learning curve to a more simple interaction. I apologize that we have not been able to clearly explain what is the nature of the problem we are facing in terms of crashes. I will do that now and also open the strategy.

When we started padkite development we underestimated its implementation, I agree with the says above. We are recovering after hitting the head against the wall. The only way to reach a goal and a vision is to walk the path and we are now walking again.

Going to the problem, in order to achieve the magic in the videos (Eclair) we forked WebKit pretty much with amazing results that we consider worth fighting for. However while developing we only tried it on a small amount of devices showing good results. We did not know about the coming hassle. A mistake from our side considering the application low level interaction via JNI and the system dependencies that change on every phone. We had no idea of the real problem we had to face and overcome.

The real problem is not the application itself we created but the system libraries we operate with and its dependencies that change on every cellphone. Lets say we created padkite so that knows how to eat apples from a cellphone tree. So when padkite is installed, it expects to find an apple tree but instead there is an orange tree and crashes. Manufacturers patch their systems on every release. Our job now is to instruct padkite to understand every tree of every cellphone. In short port it to every cellphone. In some cases a port is suitable for more than one phone in some cases not.

What is that we port?. The key library for padkite is librtwebcore.so. We have developed our own version from source scratch and its being deployed with the apk (size of app is mainly due to that library, we are also working also to avoid this on he apk in next release so we will make it lighter). So librtwebcore.so is our own tree and we have to adjust it to each cellphone. Currently we have two different versions of that library which is quite an achievement already, we are working to extend it.

We have recently done this on our own with good results with the Galaxy Tab. But we do not have all cellphones to try and there is where we need help. We think that xda is a great place to get started in order to solve the problem. Please help us to overcome it and make padkite evolve.

Apologize again for the inconvenience. Thanks very much.

Jose Vigil

RoamTouch CEO