Now you can overcharge customers from the bus!

Bandwidth Barons now runs on Android. Same free demo, same questionable business practices, now in your pocket.

The whole game takes place on NetOps 98, so fitting it on a phone held upright took more work than I expected. My first try showed one window at a time, like a Pocket PC. It felt wrong, so the windows float again: each one takes the width of the screen, they cascade the way Win98 did, and you can drag them around by their title bars. The taskbar grows to two rows, and every button is big enough for a thumb.

A few things work differently on a phone:

• Hold a finger on a row to see its tooltip, the way hovering works on a computer.
• Back minimizes the window in front.
• Switch to another app and the game pauses and saves, so your customers stay exactly as angry as you left them.

It’s not on Google Play yet, so you download the APK from its itch.io page and install it yourself. Android will warn you about apps from unknown sources. Fair enough: you’re installing an ISP related app.

Your saves stay on the phone. There’s no cloud sync yet, which is very authentic for 1999.

Also new on every platform since launch:

• You set your own dial-up price now, and your rival changes theirs too.
• Three save slots and three autosaves.
• Istanbul is now the hardest city to turn a profit in. No comment.

My entire QA department is me, so if anything looks wrong on your phone, leave a comment with its model. Your ticket won’t sit in a queue until you rage-quit. That only happens in the game.