Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

raptureinvenice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 342 posts

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

#61

Post by pizzacowboy »

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.

Aw, that makes me sad. I've been telling myself I'm going to get into the VR scene and dive in with Oculus. I was hoping it would be a dev-friendly environment.

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

#62

Post by striking »

pizzacowboy wrote: post #61
gjolund wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aw, that makes me sad. I've been telling myself I'm going to get into the VR scene and dive in with Oculus. I was hoping it would be a dev-friendly environment.

I've heard (and experienced) great things about Unreal Engine 4 with HTC Vive. I have a couple friends using it for an independent study at Uni. It's great fun, and the Vive and its controllers are honestly excellent pieces of hardware.

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

#63

Post by striking »

TylerE wrote: post #37
praneshp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or Godot, or Love2D, or many other open source game engines with both desktop and mobile functionality.

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

#64

Post by tluyben2 »

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.

>They should be ashamed of the Oculus/GearVR developer experience, it was the determining factor in my abandoning Oculus.

Yep and I think too many have that same feeling. Not sure if they can afford that but we will see.

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

#65

Post by thirdreplicator »

Given all the grief expressed in the post and the comments, it seems like if someone architected a really nice, developer-friendly native mobile API for any platform you would get droves of devs flocking to it.... Despite the two major players, the market seems wide open as long as they focused on the development experience like what Matz did for Ruby... Programmers are customers too! :)

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

#66

Post by tluyben2 »

tananaev wrote: post #42

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 th…

I am an expert in iOS dev but I use and want to like Android. It is quite annoying... I really do not like the walled garden of Apple and on Android devices, even cheap MTK ones I am quite handy at installing what I want, but for some reason I find Android development a real pain compared to iOS where I find most older things (stuff, as it goes in life, needs to mature) very obvious and easy.

I would say what most annoys me about iOS is the GPL thing which is the reason, among others, there are no emulators in the Appstore, at least no relevant ones. As owner of a museum and fan of old machines I cannot do without emulators. On my Android tablet I have around 50. Emulators is a niche but no GPL is hampering a lot for everyone on iOS.

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

#67

Post by botw »

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…

same feeling

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

#68

Post by EdwardDiego »

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…

> 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.

Why is that insane? Sure, your core APIs and tooling change, but software developers should be able to learn, and read documentation. Chances are, you're writing the same sorts of applications in both, and the same principles of good software development apply. Why would a Java developer be water in .NET's oil? Or vice versa? They're reasonably similar languages targeting similar niches. It's like saying that a Django web-dev could never move to a RoR job.

I'm curious because I spent a few years self-learning .NET (C# but I love F#) because I was trying to get into the industry in a town dominated by .NET, and ended up being hired by a Java shop.

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

#69

Post by JamesBarney »

thirdreplicator wrote: post #65

Given all the grief expressed in the post and the comments, it seems like if someone architected a really nice, developer-friendly native mobile API for any platform you would get droves of devs flocking to it.... Despite the two major players, the market seems wide open as long as they focused on the development experience like what Matz did for Ruby... Programmers are customers too! :)

I've heard a lot of praise for the Windows phone developer experience, but what really matters is the audience. Dev's flock to the audience. Even just a small pay difference will dev's to deal with the most terrible of developer experiences(ex. Sharepoint)

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

#70

Post by naiyt »

thirdreplicator wrote: post #65

Given all the grief expressed in the post and the comments, it seems like if someone architected a really nice, developer-friendly native mobile API for any platform you would get droves of devs flocking to it.... Despite the two major players, the market seems wide open as long as they focused on the development experience like what Matz did for Ruby... Programmers are customers too! :)

React Native is getting there. It's still early software with a lot of problems but it has a lot of promise. My anecdotal experience as someone learning mobile development was that React Native was a lot easier to pick up and learn than native Android development. Despite a large number of issues the developer experience has been really slick and I've been able to iterate much faster.

Give it a couple of years and I think it'll be exactly what you're asking for.

Post reply on HN