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I've done some digging to figure out why so many Unity SDK based games are broken on our XD+ handheld. As it turns out disabling Android's allowBackup flag will make these games play just fine.

This flag, when set in an APK file, allows a game to store savegames in the Google Cloud, giving you, the user, an easy way to move between devices without losing your data.

As it turns out though, Unity f*cked up and not only backs up your savegame, but several .so files as well (.so files are a Linux variant of .dll files, just mentioning this here to give our Windows users a little heads-up here).

This means that, whenever your system downloads a savegame backup, it essentially overwrites part of the games actual code (which it shouldn't), causing it to crash in the process.

This is, for example, the reason why Genshin Impact is so damn hard (near impossible) to boot for the first time after a fresh install, but boots just fine after one managed to get it booted at least once.

The problem with this bug is that, sadly, its not up to me to fix it... this is something the game developers have to address by upgrading their Unity SDK to a newer build that isn't affected by this bug... (which most of them never do...)

It also doesn't help that this bug doesn't affect all chipsets equally... its a bug that (mostly) triggers on relatively low-end chipsets (to which our MT8173, sadly, belongs).

But, even though I can't properly fix it, I can mitigate it... thus I am now asking all of you.

What do you want me to do?

Comments

Anonymous

I'm not sure I could name any Unity games...are they all android based games? I voted to break the games. I'm much more Interested in emulation stability.

blackseraph

Pretty much all Mihoyo games run off of it, the Life is strange series, several Team 17 games, and many many more. Also Emulators are pretty much the only applications that shouldn't be affected by this as I've yet to find one that actually has this flag enabled. Besides API level 30 apps of course, as the flag is mandatory for those, but I haven't seen any emulators use that one yet.