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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

#41

Post by chinhodado »

RivieraKid wrote: post #38
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.…

I used to think Activity lifecycle management is complex. Then I learned about Fragments and I started to loathe every moment I have to work with them. What a bloated mess:

http://staticfree.info/~steve/complete_android_fragment_life...

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

#42

Post by tananaev »

I think there are no developers that are true experts in both Android and iOS platforms. Every developer I know either leans towards one platform or another. There are also developers who know both platforms pretty well, but I won't call them experts in either.

I consider myself an expert in Android development. The only point that I agree with is multidex, but there are historical reasons for the limitation and I think Google engineers are trying to fix this problem or make it as simple as possible to use multidex.

I occasionally do iOS development and some things in iOS don't make sense to me, but I'm sure they would be obvious for an iOS expert.

My advice for mobile developers or future mobile developers is to specialize in a single platform that you like more. For me it's Android. For the author of the article, it seems to be iOS.

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

#45

Post by seibelj »

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.

Unity is one example, another would be libGDX[0]. A game engine will give you a blank window, like an OpenGL context, which you draw raw onto. Any decent graphics library will provide useful functions for drawing 2D and 3D graphics, updating the screen, handling input, etc. to make using it easier.

Making a typical UI application means reusing lots of widgets provided by the OS, like buttons and sliders, to keep things consistent and make development much faster. If you tried to build a normal UI app inside a graphics engine, you could do it, but you would have to build all widgets from scratch and it wouldn't look like a native UI app.

[0] https://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/

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

#46

Post by msh »

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…

When have open won over windows on the desktop?

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

#47

Post by popmystack »

credo wrote: post #14

Like the op, I do both iOS and Android development work. However, as an indie, my platform preference is primarily market-driven. So most of my work has been on iOS Unlike the OP, I like and use Android AsyncTasks. I have no problems with Android fragments either. However, I did have a lot of other concerns with Android - primarily the low quality of Google's SDK for Android. Here is what I wrote about it https://blo…

>primarily the low quality of Google's SDK for Android.

This has always been my biggest frustration with Android. I've written a few applications for the platform, and while their architecture leaves a lot to be desired I've never had any real problems with it. However, the immense disappoint and anger that comes from their SDK idiosyncrasies is astounding. Google really just hates stability and nice API's, in my opinion. Everything from GAE to Android, it's always just so terribly frustrating to keep track of any one-off decisions they make without any form of actual communication from the development team.

I've been writing Android code since the G1 days.

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

#48

Post by copperx »

msh wrote: post #46
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…

When have open won over windows on the desktop?

See, when a cancer patient dies from a non-cancer cause, we say "the patient won over cancer."

We won over the Windows desktop because mobile killed the desktop.

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

#49

Post by rifung »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #40

> 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.…

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

What's wrong with ant? I liked it.. It was simple to understand for the most part.

It also made it easy to develop without an IDE, although I'll admit I don't know how easy it is now as I stopped doing Android a year ago

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

#50

Post by rcheu »

I've been doing Android development since the G1 release. I agree with most of these points, but think they're also not a huge deal after you've been working with the platform for awhile. The biggest issue is by far the iteration speed though. Build/install take way too long--Android Studio for some reason takes 15 seconds to start my app even if no changes have occurred.

Instant run is supposed to solve this, but it's too buggy to be useable right now. Sometimes your changes just don't apply, but you never know if that happened or you messed up your fix.

I actually preferred ant since I better understood what it was doing. Gradle error messages are often very vague and confusing, and build times are strangely inconsistent.

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