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

raptureinvenice.com

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

#51

Post by [deleted] »

gjolund wrote: post #26
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…

Double that complexity if you also want a web app that works across all modern browsers. I wish the big 4 would get their act together and stop pissing on each others legs. FB is the most recent entry into this clusterfuck. They should be ashamed of the Oculus/GearVR developer experience, it was the determining factor in my abandoning Oculus. It is the developer that pays the cost in the end.

[deleted]

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

#52

Post by taneq »

Ologn wrote: post #27

I don't think lifecycles, phone rotation etc. are much of a problem, because once you know them, you know them. I think the problem is Android keeps changing the current best practices. I'm not even sure how to know what those are - if you enter code from the Android tutorial into Android Studio, much of it is deprecated. In January 2011, the way to do tabs in Android was via LocalActivityManager. Then in February 20…

I've only dabbled in Android but this is what drives me mad. I spend a month digging in and learning "how to develop for Android" and then six months later when I go to use that knowledge for my real job, everything's changed. What was best practice last time I looked is now frowned upon, deprecated or flat-out broken, whole generations of new best practice have churned by, and current 'best practice' isn't compatible with any handset more than three months old.

If you're doing it 40+ hours a week then maybe the ongoing investment is worth it but to me it's a colossal waste of time.

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

#53

Post by copperx »

seibelj wrote: post #9

Unless you are writing a Tier 1 application that needs every fancy do-hicky, I don't see the point of 100% native anymore. Use React Native, then if necessary have a devoted native developer for each platform to handle parts that absolutely have to be executed in native and provide a JavaScript API. If you are a big company with tons of money, sure, create duplicate teams to make the same app for each platform. But i…

I'm all for write-once-deploy-everywhere, but React Native is better suited for apps that could be easily written web-only. Maybe I don't get what's better about React Native over a native app that is just a web view.

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

#54

Post by taneq »

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

You're clearly still young and haven't yet burned out on learning new technologies that (a) are just poorly thought out rehashes of existing technologies, with everything renamed to sound new, and (b) go obsolete within a few months, flushing your precious time investment down the toilet with them as they go.

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

#55

Post by copperx »

cageface wrote: post #13

iOS has plenty of developer pain points as well, although in their case a lot of them are as much a result of dumb Apple policies as they are technical mistakes. I'm going the other way. After six years of iOS work I've had enough. I still think the web is the smart long term bet so that's where I intend to focus my energies.

I agree. However, I would have never thought that developers would be so miserable in 2016. Say what you will about the desktop; developing for it was a pleasure (except for you, Win32 API) compared to what we have in 2016.

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

#56

Post by stuaxo »

rifung wrote: post #49
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

Almost every ant file I've had the pleasure of working with in the wild is made badly (having to run things in specific order instead of depending on each other is a classic).

With Android, they seemed to change the build files every minor release (my info may be out of date here).

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

#57

Post by exanddevxyz »

What is surprising is that google with their much celebrated hiring practices for senior devs managed to hire no one who could say no to such insanities like Fragments and Async and the entire Android dev platform/toolkit as it stands today.

Apple, formerly famous for being design hippies who couldnt care less about performance, have topped the mobile performance charts for nearly a decade straight now and with no end in sight. An entire decade! They merely had the wisdom of not choosing java to base their platform on.

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

#58

Post by copperx »

taneq wrote: post #52
Ologn wrote: post #27

I don't think lifecycles, phone rotation etc. are much of a problem, because once you know them, you know them. I think the problem is Android keeps changing the current best practices. I'm not even sure how to know what those are - if you enter code from the Android tutorial into Android Studio, much of it is deprecated. In January 2011, the way to do tabs in Android was via LocalActivityManager. Then in February 20…

I've only dabbled in Android but this is what drives me mad. I spend a month digging in and learning "how to develop for Android" and then six months later when I go to use that knowledge for my real job, everything's changed. What was best practice last time I looked is now frowned upon, deprecated or flat-out broken, whole generations of new best practice have churned by, and current 'best practice' isn't compatibl…

I feel that way about most of the development world.

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

#59

Post by flukus »

rifung wrote: post #49
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

The problem I had with it was all the crap google would do automagically, not really an ant problem, but building android software is a mess:

http://flukus.github.io/2014/08/19/2014_08_19_Android-Take-b...

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

#60

Post by bitmapbrother »

I did a search on Google Play for apps from this developer and all I found were:

1. A work in progress To Do list app with 1-5 installs:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raptureinv...

2. A Craigslist notifier with 100-500 installs:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raptureinv...

I don't mean to belittle the qualifications of this developer, but if his Android applications are any indication of the quality of his future iOS applications then good riddance on behalf of Android users.

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