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It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

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Re: It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

#31

Post by m_mueller »

virmundi wrote: post #6

I don't think that the person is being lazy. I've tried my hand at Android. I will continue to do so. I don't like it for the reasons enumerated in the post. The whole damn thing is a hack at this point. No one has a good generalizable architectural model for laying out an Android project. Attempting to target multiple devices is truly a pain. You can do it. You have to really, really think about. You also have to en…

I was surprised to learn that Android in 2016 doesn't even natively come with an equivalent of JavascriptCore. You have the pleasure of somehow getting V8 to run and then serialize/deserialize all your native objects manually in order to talk to it if you want javascript outside the browser. Really? From the company that is the most web native around, and even developed the most common browserless JS runtime (V8)?

Google's user faced architecture often just seems like an unmanaged jumbled up bunch of code that they throw at you, good luck have fun.

Re: It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

#32

Post by wvenable »

ClayFerguson wrote: post #17

Developers do need to pick a set of core technologies, and stick to it or a career can fall apart I bet. I don't know from experience. I've been a Java DEV ever since MSFT tried to hijack the Java language with a proprietary version back in 1998, and I abandoned MSFT and never went back. I can imagine trying to be both iOS and Android developer would be about as insane as trying to be both .NET and Java developer. Oi…

> They may be successful a while longer but "open" ALWAYS wins in the end.

That only works when there is an "open" that is in competition. iOS is certainly the most closed platform but Android isn't really open enough to be competition. Microsoft is making their platform more like iOS and Android every day. Linux on mobile is a non-starter as usual.

The fact that the past played out a certain way is no guarantee that it will play out the same in the future.

I kind of agree on being a mostly single-stack developer. I dabble in C, C++, C#, etc and I'm perfectly ok with using very different platforms for very different problems. But using very similar platforms to solve very similar problems feels like a huge waste of time and mental effort.

Re: It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

#33

Post by rtpg »

Kind of an OT whine relative to the contents, but I'm still extremely frustrated at how hard it is to get other languages working on Android due to the multidex-style issues.

Google should be spending millions being able to get app development up and running in something like Python. Have your app up and working in 2 minutes without having to learn Java. It boggles the mind that this isn't the case, and that the current tooling environment is soooo impossible to wrap ones mind around.

Re: It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

#34

Post by wvenable »

simophin wrote: post #2

i have to say, refusing/unable/lazy/ to learn is the most terrible thing ever happened to a developer. I'm always excited about new things even I have to learn them hard, even they start with poor quality, but I believe these are what make developers happy

I have little patience for learning the same thing over and over but only slightly different. It's just a big waste of time. There's no enjoyment or happiness down that path.

Learning totally different and interesting stuff, that's a whole different story.

Re: It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

#35

Post by praneshp »

seibelj wrote: post #20
rhizome wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. How can there then be all of these weekend tossoff games in the Play Store that work just fine? Unless I'm unclear on what you mean by "platform."

An app that uses native UI widgets is very different from a game which uses a graphics engine. The game compiles cross-platform with minimal changes.

Can you point me to a good resource for "a game which uses a graphics engine". Last week, I built both an android app and an iOS app, and would like to build something that compiles cross-platform to complete the set.

Re: It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

#36

Post by [deleted] »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #18

A while back, Dianne Hackborn famously said: "We often see questions from developers that are asking from the Android platform engineers about the kinds of design patterns and architectures they use in their apps. But the answer, maybe surprisingly, is we often don't have a strong opinion or really an opinion at all." (1) While that may have been a lofty ideal, in practice Android has many strict requirements on how…

[deleted]

Re: It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

#37

Post by TylerE »

praneshp wrote: post #35
seibelj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An app that uses native UI widgets is very different from a game which uses a graphics engine. The game compiles cross-platform with minimal changes.

Can you point me to a good resource for "a game which uses a graphics engine". Last week, I built both an android app and an iOS app, and would like to build something that compiles cross-platform to complete the set.

I would assume he is talking about something like Unity.

Re: It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

#38

Post by RivieraKid »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #18

A while back, Dianne Hackborn famously said: "We often see questions from developers that are asking from the Android platform engineers about the kinds of design patterns and architectures they use in their apps. But the answer, maybe surprisingly, is we often don't have a strong opinion or really an opinion at all." (1) While that may have been a lofty ideal, in practice Android has many strict requirements on how…

> After all these years, I still find the most difficult and un-natural thing is mixing concurrency / background tasks that must outlive the UI with complex UI component lifecycles.

Completely agree. I've been developing for Android since 1.0 and the complex interaction between background tasks and activity lifecycle is the worst part of Android that a significant majority of devs get wrong, introducing subtle bugs. (And the worst thing is that the documentation pretends like this issue doesn't exist last time I checked. Newbie developers have no chance getting this right, even experienced dev often ignore it.)

Overall, I wouldn't say Android is poorly designed, it's just mediocre, I would expect more from Google. In general, I'd say the design lacks simplicity and elegance. Some examples:

- Fragments. Activities were already overly complicated and for some mysterious reason they took it to the next level with fragments. (They should get rid of or redesigned activities too.)

- Older version of Google Cloud Messaging library - hundreds of lines of source code to implement a basic hello world example (wth)?

- Documentation is unclear in some cases, promoting some cargo cult patterns such view holders (zero effect on performence these days). Also, services, if you don't need IPC, the only "feature" of a service is that it lowers the probability that the app gets killed. I usually just create a simple service and start / stop it as a way to telling the system "don't kill the app".

Re: It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

#39

Post by sehugg »

georgeecollins wrote: post #24

Gradle has problems, but it doesn't seem worse to me than making builds in Eclipse was. I would love to hear why people think it is better or worse. I agree multidex is terrible. Google please fix this. I do not know when I should use a fragment instead of a view. I know the layout reasons google gives in their developer guide but I don't think I have seen a piece of code that really uses fragments that way. So why?…

I've been often thwarted by Gradle's anything-goes syntax (everything is a Groovy program) and obfuscated error messages. Also the switch to Android Studio. Leave an app alone for a month and I can't compile it anymore.

Re: It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

#40

Post by MaulingMonkey »

> Google’s adoption of gradle has been a disaster and proved to be a terrible decision. It did help out with some previous issues, namely multiple app targets, but it’s slowed down compilation severely. It also makes for masochistic configuration files with major redundancy and fragmented dependency hosts. Getting an app to compile shouldn’t be a challenge.

The only thing worse than gradle is ANT, which it replaced.

> Wait, what is picasso? Oh wow, I hadn’t heard of that one…I was busy learning Swift.

I just minimize the amount of platform specific tech in the codebase as much as possible. RxJava? That's going to be real fun to port...

Ahh, this didn't even touch on my least favorite part of Android - command line tools that tell you they've "successfully" deployed APKs. And returned successful return codes. That in reality silently failed due to ever so slightly loose USB connections.

On the plus side, they finally fixed https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=197287 in Android 7.0 it looks like...? I'm trying to remember if that was the bug to blame for my last 16 hour day...

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