Beijing, China-based PapayaMobile is a major supporter of Android-based social gaming. It has a dozen social games running on Android, has registered 4 million users  to date and its Papaya Farm HD is currently a featured app on Android Market.

Now, the company is encouraging other developers to create social games for the Android platform with its recently released Papaya Game Engine. The free, OpenGL (open graphics library) platform allows developers to create Android-based social games using programming language similar to Flash or Python.

Papaya says  programmers using the game engine can begin to code "sophisticated" social games in about a week and reports that it took a Papaya engineer using its new technology just two weeks to code its new Papaya Fish 3D.

Company co-founder and CEO Si Shen says the company developed the engine to help developers interested in creating social games for Android overcome the platform's considerable fragmentation problems.

"A lot of the low-end Android phones aren't able to handle high traffic and memory usage, so it's hard to make social games for Android," Shen says. "This game engine helps resolve that problem."

Shen says earlier iterations of Android don't offer a lot of memory to third-party applications, making it impossible for devices using Android 1.5 Cupcake and 1.6 Donut to load the memory-intensive graphics used in social games.

Even with the greater memory allocations in 2.1 Éclair and 2.2 Froyo, developers are still challenged by the variety of screen sizes using the platform. For instance, the Froyo-based Galaxy Tab has a seven-inch screen, while the Froyo-based LG Optimus One has a screen just half that size.

The Game Engine resolves some of the most serious fragmentation issues facing Android social game developers with features like resource caching management and automatic device detection and adaptation. The technology also integrates Papaya's social features, such as challenges, avatars and location, and allows developers to offer virtual currency through Papaya's billing system. Developers don't have to use Papaya's virtual currency or billing for apps developed with its game engine, but those who choose to do so will hand over 20 percent of their sales to Papaya.

Though Papaya does employ a revenue share with developers who use the engine's virtual currency or billing, Shen says the main goal of the company's Game Engine was to expand use of its platform. Even if developers don't use Papaya's virtual currency or billing, users of their apps will still be automatically plugged into Papaya's social network, expanding the company's reach for social games.

Looking ahead, Shen expects adoption of the Android operating system in China to "explode" in the next year. The company will continue to focus its limited resources on Android, though the company eventually wants to make its games compatible with a variety of mobile operating systems. Papaya's games currently available through the Android Market and can also be purchased on jail-broken iPhones through Cydia.

Papaya was founded in 2008 by Shen and Wenjie Qian, who serves as the company's chief technology officer. The company landed $4 million in funding from DCM in June at launch of its Android SDK, and Shen says the company has been profitable for about a year. The company says about 150 applications with 4 million users have integrated its SDK, bringing the total number of users on its platform to 8 million.