When will Alight Motion be available for my device?

Summary

Here's a quick overview of what's supported; scroll down for details.

• Supported now: Android 6.0 and Higher (if your device meets minimum requirements)
• Supported early/mid 2019: Android 5.1 and higher.
• Supported early/mid 2019: iPhone/iPad
• Working on it but not sure when: Chromebook (but it might work unofficially now)
• No plans: Android 5.0, or 4.x or lower

IMPORTANT: If Alight Motion is not listed when you visit Google Play, please see this article for more information.

Supported Now: Android 6.0 and Higher

Alight Motion is currently available in beta for all devices that meet the following criteria:

• Operating System:  Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) or higher
• OpenGL Support:  OpenGL ES 2.0 or higher
• RAM:  Minimum 1GB RAM, but at least 2GB strongly recommended
• Chipset/SoC:
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon
  • Samsung Exynos
  • MediaTek
  • Kirin HiSilicon
  • Tegra
  • Intel Atom

If Google Play says your device is not supported, it is probably because it is running an older Android version (lower than 6.0). Read below for more information on our plans to support Alight Motion on other Android versions.

If your device is running Android 6.0 and later and it still says that it is not supported, it might be for any of the following reasons (unfortunately, there is nothing we can do for any of these cases):

• Your device only supports OpenGL ES 1.1. This is probably not the reason, as it is extremely rare for any modern device not to support OpenGL 2.0 or higher. However, if this is the case, we're very sorry—there is no technical way to make Alight Motion work without OpenGL ES 2.0 support.
  
  
• Your device doesn't have enough RAM. We don't generally prevent Alight Motion from being downloaded on low-RAM devices (although you may have trouble using video or lots of grouped layers in your projects), but in some rare cases, we've had to block a very low-RAM device because of unresolvable problems.
  
  
• Your device has an unsupported chipset. Note that the list of chipsets above is just a guideline. Occasionally low-end chipsets from one of the listed manufacturers may still not be supported, or occasionally an unlisted chipset may work. There are simply too many different chipsets for us to test all of them, so generally, we allow downloads for all chipsets until we become aware of a problem on a specific chipset that cannot be solved, in which case we may block phones with that chipset. If you have a Marvell, Spreadstrum, or Rockchip chipset, we're really sorry—there's generally nothing we can do to support those chipsets.

Android 5.1 Support

We are working very hard to add Android 5.1 and higher support as soon as possible. However, it will take time to make the necessary adjustments in our engine, and our first priority is on fixing issues and improving stability for devices that are already supported. We expect it to be a few months before we can offer Android 5.1 support. We know there are a lot of Android 5.1 users out there, so we appreciate your understanding.

UPDATE: We've been working on 5.1 support, but unfortunately preview performance on 5.1 devices is extremely poor. We have to re-work a lot more than we expected to achieve reasonable performance under Android 5.1. This is an ongoing project for us, but unfortunately we don't know how long it will take.

Android 5.0, 4.x and Lower Support

We don't currently have plans to support Android 4.x or lower.

We are investigating the possibility of 5.0 support, but at this time it seems unlikely it will be possible.

Unfortunately, due to architectural limitations within older versions the Android operating system, it is very difficult to offer Alight Motion features on those older versions. At this time, the development cost in time and money to support Alight Motion on Android 4.x or lower would be prohibitively expensive, and with the rapidly shrinking number of users worldwide using Android 4.x, we had to make the tough decision not put older Android versions on the roadmap.

If you are an Android 4.x user:  Some of our team members have older Android 4.x devices that we're rather attached to for sentimental reasons, so we do understand your pain. Unfortunately, it just doesn't make good business sense for us to spend the time and money on it (if we even had that kind of money!). We're very sorry and we hope you understand our decision.

Chromebook Support

Although we don't yet officially support Chromebooks (mainly because we are a small team and simply haven't had the time to test on them), in principle, Alight Motion should work on any Chromebook that supports Android apps. That is, any Chromebook that says stable channel next to it on this page.

This doesn't mean we don't care about Chromebooks. On the contrary, we think they are the future: The idea of doing promotion graphics and visual effects on a low-cost budget laptop is very attractive, and a vision we share. Once the smartphone versions are stable, we plan to start testing on Chromebooks, and we have plans for special additional features that take advantage of the Chromebook form factor.

We don't have a schedule yet but stay tuned for updates.

iPhone/iPad Support

Last but certainly not least, iPhone/iPad support.

Half of our team are dedicated iPhone users, so rest assured, we ARE working on this.

We currently expect to be able to offer iPhone support in mid-2019 (yes, this was a change from our previous "early 2019" schedule). As with any software in development, surprises happen and unexpected schedule changes come up, so we can't make that an official promise. We do promise to make it happen as soon as we possibly can.

To our precious (future) users on iPhone/iPad, we can promise this: It will be worth the wait.

For everyone asking about TestFlight access: It's still too early for that. However, we will be opening a limited closed beta sometime in early-to-mid 2019. This is because Apple limits the number of users who can participate in a TestFlight beta. If you are interested, please subscribe to our product launch mailing list by entering your email address at the bottom of the main https://alightcreative.com/ page. We will send out instructions on how to get an TestFlight invitation once we get closer to beta release.

Thank you so much for your understanding.