Now I'm worried: Performance on Android

I watched this video: The realities of publishing mobile games with Godot Engine - Devlog 9
I’m learning Godot, specifically to create a mobile game. The video shows two concerns about running a Godot 4 game on Android: Abysmal performance and crashes.
Is this the experiance for you? Should I switch to another game engine?

What phone and what game and what developer?

I didn’t watch the video. But here are my initial thoughts:

  1. There are lots of things you can do to tweak performance.
  2. Crashes are typically caused by poor coding practices and not the engine/language used to make a game.

Why didn’t I watch the video? Well, you didn’t give us enough information to make it necessary. And if you had, it wouldn’t be necessary to watch the video. So here’s a few questions for you:

  1. Was the game in the video 2D or 3D?
  2. Are you planning on doing a 2D or 3D game?
  3. Were the textures and models optimized for a 2D/3D game?
  4. Were they using a custom version of Godot to publish their game? In other words, did they take out the engine they were not using and make other optimizations to reduce the size of the game?
  5. What physics engine were they using? Default, Jolt, Rapier, Quark?
  6. What language were they using? GDScript, C#,or a GDExtension (C++, Rust, Go, Python, Lua, etc.)?
  7. Have you spent any time using the Godot engine yourself yet to test out the performance of your ideas?
  8. Are you planning on making all the same choices they did?

There’s a lot that goes into making a game. And if you’re making a mobile game, you have to understand that the hardware players have will be varied. You can either try to support anyone, or target high-end hardware.

No, it hasn’t been - but I’ve only had people testing games I haven’t published a mobile game yet.

Which game engine were you thinking of switching to? Unity or Unreal? How come you chose Godot in the first place?

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The author of the video have a low-poly 3d game which he initially developed under Godot 3.x, which runs ok, but when he ported it to Godot 4.x (due to waining support of plugins for 3.x,) the game performed poorly on his Pixel 8 pro. He tried both the native physics engine, and Jolt. From the comments I see he tried both the Mobile and the Compatibility modes. None of these changed the performance issues.
I actually want to develop a simple 2D puzzle game, which Godot may be a little of an overkill for. I considered using Cocos2D-X, but it seem to be dated. I wanted an open-source engine that is actively being developped, and has a big community around it, so I chose Godot.

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You are not going to have the same issues with 2D that he is having with 3D.

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As far as I understood from the video the performance problems come from Collision checks. I am working on a 2D game with a lot of collision checks and performance takes a dip at a very high count. This of course took a bit of optimizing and fiddling, but all in all Godot is capable of handling a lot in 2D so far.

Also “porting” can mean a lot of things. Not to downplay the video author’s experience, but they kept talking about Jolt and Godot Default physics as means of “trying different solutions” and not digging deeper, showing their code or anything. So this is all very dramatic and diffuse.

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