Craig Grannell:
When iOS 9 hit beta last summer, I heard concerns from developers about Game Center. Never Apple’s most-loved app, it had seemingly fallen into a state of disrepair. In many cases, people were reporting it outright failed to work.
Six months later, little has changed. If anything, Game Center has gotten worse, with major problems increasingly widespread. These include the Game Center app launching as a white screen, and Game Center freezing the Settings app when you try to access its options.You might wave this away as a trifling problem. If so, I imagine you don’t play games. Game Center isn’t just about logging highscores — it’s also crucial for the functionality of many turn-based multiplayer titles.
Is Game Center an orphan? Hate to see this kind of neglect.
As the richest company in the world, Apple has no excuse for constantly allowing at least one major component of the iOS platform to languish. Often more than one. They’d move heaven and earth to fix or replace something important (like MobileMe, Maps) but knowingly let others rot. There is no excuse.
Apple is simply bad at social. Everyone knows this. Game Center is basically a social network for gaming, like Xbox Live. Its no surprise that Game Center gets neglected. I will say that I have no trouble with Game Centers functionality in iOS 9, but I do wish for more depth in its functionality. Give someone a reason to actually launch the Game Center app. As it stands right now, its more like a hidden service that a user invokes from within a game, rather than actually launching Game Center and performing any social action.
I don’t understand it. I’m sure tons of Apple’s engineers use Twitter daily. Their social efforts are always so half-baked, you would think they came from people who have never used Twitter or FB.
Haven’t opened the app for ..years? Is it still “iOS 6” looking skew’ as well?
Keep getting challenges(notifications) for games i don’t have and possibly from people I don’t know- don’t bother finding out
Unacceptable, and this isn’t the only first party iOS app issue or app that needs a serious over haul.. iCloud Drive – why can Dropbox instantly search all your files from home screen, and iCloud Drive can’t?!!
I have two games in the pipeline, and I doubt I’ll bother including the game centre function, unless it helps with marketing – that challenge feature I’m whinging about in previous post may help “market” the app, or just annoy people especially if the app isn’t free / IaP free to play.
As I noted in my article, Game Center is not just a social network—Apple pushed i heavily to devs as the glue for multiplayer online gaming. Subsequently, many games are entirely reliant on Game Center in order to function. Without it, devs are at best receiving a flood of horrible reviews, and are losing money. It’s hardly surprising that devs are now increasingly rolling their own solutions again and releasing updates to circumvent Game Center.