Introducing Crosswalk: the new way to publish to Android

[AshleyScirra]

Crosswalk is a way of publishing HTML5 games and apps as Android native apps, using Chromium for Android. We've written about it more on our blog:

 

https://www.scirra.com/blog/133/introducing-crosswalk-the-new-way-to-publish-to-android

 

This is a huge improvement over non-browser wrappers like CocoonJS and Intel's AGI - but note it only covers Android 4.0+, and not iOS.

 

It's also a lot better than the Android 4.4 Chromium-powered webview: it works for 4.0+, updates are regular and are not tied to the OS version, more features are available (WebGL, Web Audio API, etc.) and performance is far better (hardware acceleration is supported).

 

 

Android 4.0+ is 75% of devices and increasing. That does lose some devices, but it should increase to near-universal as the old 2.x devices disappear. IMO, the benefits of having a real browser engine to run your game/app vastly outweighs this and Crosswalk looks like the new best way to publish HTML5 content to Android.

[rich]

This is really great news.

[enpu]

So is the performance better than in CocoonJS?

[fatalfluff]

 

 

So is the performance better than in CocoonJS?

 

Not necessarily. I tested four of my games with it, 3 of those 4 run slower via Crosswalk (about 20 - 30%, I have not yet figured out which parts, but it's all physics-free, only drawing, basically). The main advantage is not performance - it's independence from Ludei's.. shall we say: peculiar bug fixing pace.

[enpu]

Yeah i can confirm that.

 

I tested my game on Nexus 7 with Crosswalk and got 35 fps at best, while CocoonJS gives 60 fps.

[simwhi]

We have tried this too with Construct 2.  Even though the frame rates were slower than Cocoon JS we were still happy with the initial test results.  In game we got between 35-40 and 50-55 for both games.

 

I'm confident the this will improve over time.