Adding Android games

[YDINO]

There has to be a better way to add Android games, instead of adding every single app in my system it should be an opt-in situation where it asks you to select which apps to display. I have too many apps on my phone to manually delete each non game app and extension so at the moment it's useless to me. (Any help would be greatly appreciated)

[Kuvenant]

Where did you find how to import Android games?

[Jason Carr]

Android games are added automatically on startup, if it's enabled in the options. They show up under the Android platform. But unfortunately, Android does not provide a good way (outside of unavailable information from the Play Store) to determine what apps are games and what apps aren't. So unfortunately, there's no better way to auto-import all installed Android games.

That said, yes, I can see how an opt-in option would be a good one. However, you can basically get there already just be deleting any non-game apps from the platform. They should not show back up.

[Kuvenant]

Consider this my vote to add some sort of manual import function for Android games.  I personally don't mind removing apps that are automatically imported from Launchbox, but one of my favorites never showed up and is unavailable.  My problem game is Lone Wolf Saga by GDV Games and Software.  The opt-in option would also accomplish this, but may require all apps be automatically imported which can become a massive headache in the other direction for other users.

[Jason Carr]

13 hours ago, Kuvenant said:

Consider this my vote to add some sort of manual import function for Android games.  I personally don't mind removing apps that are automatically imported from Launchbox, but one of my favorites never showed up and is unavailable.  My problem game is Lone Wolf Saga by GDV Games and Software.  The opt-in option would also accomplish this, but may require all apps be automatically imported which can become a massive headache in the other direction for other users.

Huh, I'll look into this. Not sure why any games/apps wouldn't be showing up. On my list.

[Jason Carr]

Welp, apparently I was wrong with some of this. Back when I implemented it, I did find a way to filter out to only games, but unfortunately it's relatively unreliable. The reason that Lone Wolf Saga isn't showing up is because it's been categorized under productivity for some reason, instead of games like it should be.

It looks like we could also do better at not including non-games by not adding the "Undefined" category. The only trouble there is that any game that doesn't have an explicit games category won't show up. But that is the most likely cause for non-games showing up in the list.

I guess really, to do this right, at least for the automatic approach, would be to ignore the fact that some games just aren't categorized properly and expect the games to get fixed instead of catering to the issues. I'll probably do that going forward, and then maybe we can add a manual option to fix badly categorized games/apps later.

[Kuvenant]

Quote

Welp, apparently I was wrong with some of this. Back when I implemented it, I did find a way to filter out to only games, but unfortunately it's relatively unreliable. The reason that Lone Wolf Saga isn't showing up is because it's been categorized under productivity for some reason, instead of games like it should be.

It looks like we could also do better at not including non-games by not adding the "Undefined" category. The only trouble there is that any game that doesn't have an explicit games category won't show up. But that is the most likely cause for non-games showing up in the list.

I guess really, to do this right, at least for the automatic approach, would be to ignore the fact that some games just aren't categorized properly and expect the games to get fixed instead of catering to the issues. I'll probably do that going forward, and then maybe we can add a manual option to fix badly categorized games/apps later.

No worries.  Things happen.  I am glad to see Launchbox returning to Android regardless.

As for Lone Wolf...figures.  Productive is definitely what I am when playing it.  Soooo productive.

Do what you can and I'll still appreciate your efforts.