Android

AETHYX MEDIAE & Android stuff

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Clones

Dear readers and customers,

copying and distributing Android apps which don’t belong to you and weren’t developed by you is no minor offence.

Not only do you undermine endless hours of development efforts by the original developers, you also try to mock original creations as well as users who might use your copied app.

As such, we were happy that Google was fast in helping us taking two impudent apps down from their popular Google Play Store: “Zombie Hunter Apocalypse Zone” by “lucsian” as well as “Zombie Uprise · TPS in Frontier Apocalypse Defense” by “Beasty App Media L.L.C”. Both were audacious copies of our indie IP “Zombie Resistor: Apocalypse” which was developed inhouse by us and is available since January 2020 (we published the news here). Both were also released months after our publishing.

Our DMCA complaints were sent yesterday, we just got a standard reply by Google that they’ll look into it.

As of today, as we checked recently, thanks to the hard working girls and guys there, the links as well as the corresponding apps are offline. Bigups and thanks a lot from AETHYX MEDIAE!

FYI, if you should encounter the exact same problems, give it a try yourself: https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en. Just choose Google Play – Apps here if you see illegal copies of your Android applications in the Google Play Store somewhere.

We’ll take down further clones of our apps as soon as we’ll encounter those. We’re into Android app development since 2013 and we never had to do this. How the times have changed…

Take care and never give up,
your aethyx staff

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Android

Dear readers and customers,

by the 2nd of November Google will disallow all Android app update uploads which provide no support until at least API 29/version 10.

To avoid this, we already updated some of our apps on the 21st of April but fell short for others. This was due to a transition from our development environment to the official Android Studio. We still don’t have an easy time migrating our apps, be assured. Problem here doesn’t seem to be code but the UI, especially the downwards compatibility.

So, long story short we will provide updates for YAABy and Kryptowiki over the weekend. By Monday the 2nd there will be no Android 10 missing anymore from our side. We guarantee.

Android development still is a lot of fun for us despite the quirks, so we’re not planning to fall short of more updates and new features for years to come. Plus, by planning one or two more aquisitions in the future, we surely will have something in our sleeve to surprise our users and enhance our portfolio too.

In the meantime don’t hesitate to contact us if you’re in need of an own app: visit our Android product overview page for more detailed information.

Stay healthy and happy social distancing,
the aethyx staff

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Androids

Dear readers and customers,

we constantly and passionately try hard to expand our indie universe to all those Android devices out there.

As such, we want to finally introduce you to our first new indie game IP: “Zombie Resistor: Apocalypse”!

Play Store entry for our 3D game, Zombie Resistor apocalypse
The current Play Store entry for our first video game, “Zombie Resistor: Apocalypse”

It’s as real as it gets and the title suggests: a 3rd person shooter letting you conquer Zombie realms within different levels and offering a bunch of nice weapons on your lonesome run(s) to choose from.

Running on the popular Unity engine as our premise was to release a game 100% in 3D for mobile devices. You may (or may not, to some reviewers, ehemm) also cheer our optimised touch screen controls which was a helluva work to realise.

Enjoy and shoot your way free in a world devastated by a deadly plague*! And best: downloading and playing is 100% free!

It’s incredible how long we’ve been on Droid territory, by the way: we released our first apps in May 2013, when there weren’t even 1,000,000 apps available. In the meantime the number pretty much tripled to almost 3,000,000! A double-edged sword: good for us as developers as the platform itself is a true success. But hard to conquer if you release new stuff or want to stay on devices.

No matter how we regard it, the advantages of developing for the platform still outperforms the disadvantages. It’s a lot of fun to code for those devices, too! So be aware that we might post more apps in the future, albeit we certainly won’t do any more Zombie games. 😉

Thanks for reading and happy gaming,
the aethyx staff
*As our initial release for the game was 31st of January 2020 already, similarities to current or future world events are pure coincidence, of course. One thing we never lacked: vision.

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Fresh Apple Splash

Dear readers & customers,

Happy 2020, folks!

It’s a fresh new year and as such we want you to stay fit and healthy for what lies ahead!

You know what people say about health and fruits: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away!”

What better way to start a news post for us as remembering and using exactly this analogy, right?

What’s more, right now we’re in the middle of working on our brand new health app for the Android operating system. The very first one, to be exact.

We don’t want to relieve too much but expect a release around June/July this year. This will be also the first app where we’ll offer the possibility to buy additional services in-app. We hope to make money of it (we’re indie but still a company…) as well as target an ever growing audience from the health sector. Our prognosis shows a tremendous market which will not only grow superb for the next decade, it’s exactly our thing and something we l-o-v-e to offer here officially at AETHYX MEDIAE.

Regarding our web projects we don’t think there’ll be too much development as we think these are already mature and working as intended. But also here: never say never!

For those who are joining us a bit late (AETHYX MEDIAE is becoming 10 this year, ehemm), find a neat overview about what we did and currently do here:

https://aethyx.eu/where/.

Thanks for being with us!

Drop us a line anytime: info@aethyx.eu.

We <3 you and best wishes,
the aethyx staff

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Smartphone addiction could be changing your brain

Dear readers and customers,

as app developers we ourselves not only love to use apps. We also try to keep them as clean as possible.

And with this statement we don’t mean explicitly we’re providing bug free apps before releasing them into the wild. This is common sense.

In a world full of addictions, some of them completely new since the release of the iPhone as the first smartphone in 2007, we explicitly avoid the following techniques:

* infinite scroll
All of our developed apps, as well as all of the websites we create and maintain by the way, never used any form of infinite scrolling. Today, almost any so called “social media” app or website uses this addiction technique in some form. We don’t want to mention those here. If you want to read further about this behaviour of the “bottomless bowl” technique, which affects humans, we recommend reading the experiment by Brian Wansink

* pull to refresh
As of our newest round of app updates, we eliminated this kind of refresh mechanism from all of our apps. Our websites never were affected, though. We built the mechanism in when Lollipop came out (2015 or soon thereafter) to try to experiment with new forms of refreshing when they first appeared in the smartphone operating system Android. Unfortunately, in the meantime it became clear this technique is too similar with those of slot machines. And we all know how gambling can be of a hassle for quite a lot of persons.
We are happy with it, to be honest: not only are we assured that our refresh mechanism as it was implemented was very good the way it was. We also found out that elderly persons have problems even recognising Android design patterns which are too obscure to them. Oldie but goldie, we stayed with the refresh button and a cute coloured progress bar.
Fun fact: we never were sure about this design pattern and if we should use it for all our apps. So, the only app in our portfolio which we spared with this mechanism all the time was zockerseele.com (oldschool won, woohoo! ^^). Otherwise we wouldn’t even have the code to revert anymore…

* no likes
Both of the mechanisms mentioned kick too much Dopamine into your brain, a neurotransmitter which can induce halluzinations if you abuse it too much. A lot of street drugs are responsible for it, e.g. Cannabis or Ecstasy. Third in this row are the likes, or likes in general.
Well, here this was a pure coincidence that we dropped out of Facebook completely in 2015. So none of our apps nor websites are affected since the aforementioned date.
The problem is not only the function itself but also the colour: red in most cases. The sum of phenomenons sets users in a “feedback loop state of social confirmation”. This is an official quote from Facebooks co-creator Sean Parker

As you can see, there are easier things to check if you develop apps for smartphones and tablets than human psychology, of course! Other techniques, like “the ratings of relationships”, we didn’t have to mention as we never developed dating apps. But there are other and more problems today which should be investigated and eliminated further by app developers in the near future.

Some of the new modifications in our case happened by chance. Others by mindful decisions. Or just experience.

But be assured that by now all of our apps you download from official repositories (Google Play Store, Amazon App Store and Opera App Store) lack those new-age manipulation techniques.

We hope that other app developers will follow and we gave them some good arguments using/avoiding design patterns in use today. Please show some responsibility. Thank you.

And never forget: there’s a world outside of your smartphone or tablet which is worth fighting and living for!

Only the best wishes to y’all,
the aethyx staff

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