Despite its recent success, most developers are firmly of the conviction Android plays a distant second fiddle to iPhone when it comes to paid gaming.

Developers talk of a restricted market, in which it's both harder to find games, and more fiddly to pay for them.

The appearance of social platforms such as OpenFeint, might prove to be the trigger Android needs then.

That's certainly what Supermono's Tak Fung believes, with its MiniSquadron one of the first titles to join the OpenFeint on Android party.

We caught up with Fung to find out just what he thinks Aurora Feint's platform will do for the OS.

Pocket Gamer: How big a factor do you think OpenFeint will be in fostering development on Android?Tak Fung: OpenFeint has a massive user base and also a strong developer base who use its services.

I, personally, would like OpenFeint to be a big factor on Android, since it would act as a strong, purposeful force for bringing gaming to the platform in a coherent manner.

How easy is it to port to Android?

The core code and development for porting an existing C/C++ source to Android is a bit of work, but it's not that difficult.

The real difficulty comes with working out the separate issues and nuances with all the periphery issues to do with the platform - buggy OpenGL drivers on old handsets, different and extremely poor touch control handling in various hardware and the OS itself, undocumented file size limits on apps and others.

Performance wise, how does MiniSquadron on Android compare with the iOS release?At the targeted base hardware of Nexus One running Android 2.1, it compares very well.

How have you implemented OpenFeint's cross platform elements between Android and iOS?We haven't actually decided to implement any cross platform elements - except for using the same high score tables.

However the opportunities are clear for all - a joint community and more chances of competition.

What business models are you experimenting with on Android?

Since the payment models on Android are more diverse than Apple's App Store - no in-app purchase system built in, vastly less countries which can pay for apps using Google - the challenges are more to do with logistics and working with different payment companies.

How is MiniSquadron performing in terms of downloads on Android so far?

Statistics are fairly noisy in the first few weeks - we have to remember there is the magical 24 hour free refund time which means we are seeing around a 10 percent adjustment to actual sales numbers.

But it did reach #2 in the Android top paid charts in three days, which can't be bad.

If OpenFeint made the leap to further formats, would you consider taking your titles with it?The decision to port MiniSquadron to any format is mostly down to ease of development and market size.

You can say porting MiniSquadron to the Palm Pre came down to the first reason – it's really very easy to port apps to Palm – whereas we did the Android port because of the size of its market.
Thanks to Tak for his time.