After a significant hiatus, development of Tic-tac-toe Collection has resumed.
The immediate future will be maintenance releases designed to bring my tooling and the libraries used back up to date.
There are big changes in 0.22 with how ads and consent is managed, at least for users subject to the GDPR.
Firstly a simple change: interstitial video ads have been removed. These previously could appear at the end of each game, but they will no longer.
The bigger change is the introduction of Google’s User Messaging Platform to manage consent. This will combine the previous separate dialogs that would appear about consent for analytics and consent for displaying ads into a single flow.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this, which I’ve expanded on over on my personal blog.
For the last few version I’ve been implementing the ability to share game modes. Actually triggering a share was made user facing in 0.20 but the game could load them (with varying degrees of success) before then.
It was a multiple step process because it more-or-less requires a website to exist. For example if you visit this page it includes a link to “try opening in the app”. If you click the link on desktop it will take you back to the same place since that is the fallback page for the sharing link.
An additional feature I developed at the same time as sharing is the ability to embed little game mode widgets in the site.
Another thing I’ve been doing that uses the sharing link is creating YouTube videos of the interesting game modes feature the AI.
0.19.1 of Tic-tac-toe Collection drops support for landscape orientation on phones.
This has been difficult to support and made certain complicated screens (like the game setup screen) take much more effort for very little gain.
Tablets will still support landscape orientation, however there will no longer be a custom layout for landscape (on the few screens that did).
0.19 finally brings Prime support to iOS. This includes all the current features of Prime, including the removal of ads, unlimited campaign skips, two extra icons, and two extra colors.
If you’re interested in trying it as soon as possible, please join the beta on Testflight. Purchases made on Testflight versions will not actually charge you, but will also not be available outside of Testflight versions.
The Prime in-app purchase is now available to all iOS users.
A while ago I announced that Tic-tac-toe Collection would no longer support Android Jelly Bean.
The reason was the desire by the Xamarin Forms team to drop support for it. That doesn’t seem to have happened. At least not explicitly.
Instead, more features are being added that require Android Lollipop (5.0). So at some point in the future that will become the minimum requirement for Tic-tac-toe Collection, and devices running 4.4 or lower will no longer receive updates. Existing installations will not be affected.
Tic-tac-toe Collection is now available to download for iPhone and iPad on the App Store.
All existing game modes and features are available, including cross-platform multiplayer.
Prime is not yet supported, but will be coming soon.
From 0.16.2 onwards, the app will not collect your Google Advertising ID as part of the analytics the app uses on Android. The privacy policy has been updated accordingly.
What is Google Advertising ID
This link explains it quite well, but basically it is an identifier stored on your device that identifies you to Google when using different apps and when browsing websites. This allows Google to determine a lot of information about users.
This information is not directly available to people who operate apps or websites (like me), but is available indirectly in an aggregate form. For example, I can see a report that says what percentage of my users are male or female, what their age ranges are, and even their interests broken down into various categories.
While this is all quite interesting, I realised I’m not making any decisions based on it, so I decided to disable it.
What does this have to do with advertising
One of the main uses of the data is to provide more relevant advertising. That will still be enabled for Tic-tac-toe Collection for users who have personalized ads enabled. It functions based on information already collected about you (from other places that have Google Advertising ID enabled for their analytics).
You can opt-out of Google’s advertising tracking completely.
TLDR;
With regards to Google, Tic-tac-toe Collection will no longer be a source of information about you, but will still use it if it is available.
I am happy to announce the beta version of Tic-tac-toe Collection is now available on iOS via TestFlight.
The game was always intended to be multi-platform, and the iOS version has been mostly functional the whole time. My recent work has been polishing things up and adding some platform specific features.
Platform specific features sounds more exciting than it really is - I was actually fixing analytics, crash reporting and adding ads. For the time being, I have not added in-app-purchase support so that means no Prime just yet.
Additionally, the app is limited to iPhones (no iPads) in portrait mode (you can still install on an iPad like any other iPhone app). The Android version does technically support tablets and landscape, but it has been a little half-hearted, so I decided to wait until I had improved it before enabling it for iOS.
But apart from that, all existing features are supported, including cross-platform multiplayer.