Amazon has brought its GameCircle and Whispersync for Games services to iOS, enabling developers to offer cross-platform support for saved game data, high scores and achievements. GameCircle is Amazon's answer to Apple's Game Center, offering social interaction, leaderboards and challenges, while Whispersync allows players to transfer game states between devices. Both services are handled entirely within Amazon Web Services, explains the Amazon Mobile App Distribution blog:
Because Amazon manages the creation and maintenance of the client SDK and web services that interact with each other, all the complexity and edge cases associated with synchronizing data, tracking and submitting high scores and achievements, and managing these services while offline are handled. With Whispersync, for example, simply save your game data to a local Whispersync database and Amazon handles the rest.
Importantly for some developers and gamers alike, GameCircle for iOS supports Game Center, keeping things such as achievements in sync with Apple's service as well. All of this support comes as part of GameCircle 2.0. This version also supports non-Amazon Android devices, and adds auto-conflict resolution.
Amazon is the third major company to announce a cross-platform gaming solution for iOS. Dropbox announced new developer tools back in July, and Google launched game services for Google Play in May.
Are you looking forward to GameCircle-enable iOS games?
