We could, but the main complication is that there are some minor changes we’ve made to SDL required for the software renderer to work reliably. Without those changes, the software renderer breaks when locking the screen, switching app focus, or bringing down the quick settings menu. It also breaks when you rotate the screen, but we’ve dodged that one by locking the app to landscape.
To complicate matters, the hardware renderer fails on certain devices (Android 6.0 mostly) due to a driver issue. So it’s kinda important that there’s at least one working solution for each device.
All that said, I did add a prelaunch settings screen yesterday that allows the user to adjust software rendering (and tiles on/off for low memory devices) before attempting to load the game.
So I think it’s a call that needs to be made by someone other than me. If it were my repo I’d just throw everything in there so it compiles out of the box and allows us to attempt further fixes to SDL, but if the core devs would prefer a light repo and accept the broken software renderer, then that’s fine, but it will mean users on Android 6.0 (about 25% of the player base) can’t use the app without having to restart every time they lock the screen, switch app focus, or use the quick settings menu.
