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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

#91

Post by pjmlp »

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…

> insane as trying to be both .NET and Java developer. Oil and water. Doesn't mix.

Sure it does. We do consulting projects in Java, .NET and C++.

Right now I am doing exactly three customers in .NET and one in Java.

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

#92

Post by pjmlp »

JamesBarney wrote: post #69
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)

I do hobby coding between Android and WP, and do love the experience.

Microsoft might have lost the mobile war, but they are on good track to win the hybrid laptops one.

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

#93

Post by imtringued »

0xFFC wrote: post #82
yincrash wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are examples of the iOS app of a Google product being better than the Android one? Also, can I ask which OS you primarily use for mobile?

Just Google it. http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12109832/google-apps-iphone... There is so much articles and news about it. It is completely rational decision. Google like any other company at the end wants to maximize its profit, and iPhone is where the money is (Google it, 84% of profit of whole market goes to apples pocket_ I don't remember exact number). I have used HTC desire around 2011 (I don't remember the e…

This is not a problem with android or google. The only way you can avoid this update problem is to convince ARM SoC manufacturers to standardise their SoCs instead of cooking their own soup every time. I think this is never going to happen.

Apple doesn't need to standardise. They can get away with just supporting their own devices.

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

#94

Post by andromeduck »

JamesBarney wrote: post #69
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)

Well it's good as long as you're okay with being on Windows but that can be a pretty big barrier

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

#95

Post by oldmanjay »

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…

What has "open" won to qualify for the all-caps always?

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

#96

Post by kuschku »

pjmlp wrote: post #88
RivieraKid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> Overall, I wouldn't say Android is poorly designed, it's just mediocre, I would expect more from Google. I completely agree and although I only do it as a hobby, there are lots of points that many in the community feel as pain. - They never managed to write a proper working emulator, while other companies had no problem doing so; - The whole debacle of C++ support, had JetBrains not decided to create CLion, to this…

Regarding ndk build, you forgot the tooling Google themselves uses for everything:

Bazel

That can also build NDK and Android.

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

#97

Post by dlubarov »

pjmlp wrote: post #90
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. Ant is wonderful. It runs FAST and executes builds properly. Gradle makes my fans go full throttle, takes minutes to complete builds unless I make use of a background daemon with 2GB allocated to it. If it wasn't for Android, I would never use Gradle! Even Maven feels like a pleasure (yes I do enjoy XML).

Did you try profiling your build? https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/tutorial_gradle_co...

If not then you shouldn't assume it's Gradle's fault. A lot of Android Gradle builds are slow because they proguard lots of class files, merge large dex files, etc. Which is all optional functionality of the Android plugin, not inherent to gradle.

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

#98

Post by ensiferum »

Yeah well, Craproid APIs are awful. It's gotten marginally better in tooling (the new IDE framework shits itself like only half the times compared to the Shitclipse based one), but there's still just too many brainfarts in the APIs. And ofc the implementatations are super fragmented and buggy.

Here's a case in point: Androids MediaPlayer and its state diagram. This is pretty straigthforward pipe to the underlying Khronos OpenMAX API (that is totally brain damaged and horrible by itself). https://developer.android.com/images/mediaplayer_state_diagr...

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

#99

Post by pjmlp »

dlubarov wrote: post #97
pjmlp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing worse than gradle is ANT, which it replaced. Ant is wonderful. It runs FAST and executes builds properly. Gradle makes my fans go full throttle, takes minutes to complete builds unless I make use of a background daemon with 2GB allocated to it. If it wasn't for Android, I would never use Gradle! Even Maven feels like a pleasure (yes I do enjoy XML).

Did you try profiling your build? https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/tutorial_gradle_co... If not then you shouldn't assume it's Gradle's fault. A lot of Android Gradle builds are slow because they proguard lots of class files, merge large dex files, etc. Which is all optional functionality of the Android plugin, not inherent to gradle.

Any Android Studio generated project will do.

Dual core with 8 GB, 500 GB HD, perfectly fine for Eclipse, Visual Studio, MSBuild, Ant, Maven.

No need for performance tricks like Gradle requires.

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

#100

Post by ensiferum »

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.…

> 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:

Android is just one of those Big Corp projects were you hastily throw enough shit at the wall and see what sticks. It wasn't "designed", it's just the way it came out.

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