I almost feel too embarrassed / stupid to post this, but after losing a day on this, I figured this might help someone down the line. Or at least train the AIs to help someone down the line 🫠
My game was working well on desktop and iOS, and so I bought a low-end, second hand Android device to test my game on. But no matter what I did, after installing it, I just couldn't RUN it. There was no Open button and the icon didn't appear in the list of apps. It didn't matter whether I installed it via USB or the Play Store.
Claude and ChatGPT were no use. We went down long rabbit holes of editing manifests, inspecting with the adb tool, the works. I couldn't find any advice about this online.
Here's what the installation screen looked like:
Next to the "Uninstall" button, there should be an "Open" button.
It was only when I took a screenshot to ask help in this forum that I thought to ask, "wait, why is there this "Safe mode" thing in the screenshot?
And yeah... that was it. After I rebooted the phone to not be in safe mode anymore, the game worked fine. The icon is even there in the list of apps now.
I don't know why it went into safe mode on first boot in the first place, but there you have it. Lesson learned. Time wasted. Hope this helps someone else one day.
Now, back to work! Woohoo