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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

#111

Post by AstralStorm »

fractalwrench wrote: post #86
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?…

Gradle is just incredibly slow on Android compared to Eclipse. particularly with larger projects. Instant Run has helped alleviate this to some extent, but it's still not uncommon for a build to take 2+ minutes. I guess this is mostly due to all the resource crunching that Android does, and the fact that Android Studio doesn't perform incremental compilation by default. Another annoyance is that every time a minor ch…

Incremental compilation seems to be on for newest release of Gradle, but Android is still on 2.x due to the plugin.

For our project, the most time consuming part is... Packaging. Making apk splits is slow, why does it zip the whole thing again if it is just replacing resources?

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

#114

Post by distances »

rtpg wrote: post #33

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 curr…

Nah, they should just embrace Kotlin, even if it wouldn't solve the platform API issues. Java is not for this day and age, but frankly so wouldn't be Python.

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

#116

Post by Turbots »

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?…

Slow builds in eclipse (Ant or Maven) were caused by Eclipse, not by the build framework. Ant or Maven run very fast on commandline, compared to Gradle

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

#117

Post by lubonay »

I like comparing iOS to Android development as similar to playing Mario Kart and Dark Souls... It truly is a mess and I won't be surprised if/when someone releases an Android SDK SDK (SDK squared!) that generates all the horrible boilerplate so that you can start a network request, rotate your device and get the result in your view with no additional headaches.

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

#119

Post by pjmlp »

rtpg wrote: post #33

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 curr…

Many developers on the core Android team are former Sun employees and most likely very Java biased.

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

#120

Post by newscracker »

imtringued wrote: post #93
0xFFC wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if the SoCs are standardized and drivers are updated, do you think the manufacturers have any motive or incentive to provide updates to the customers for older models? Most of them sell phones for low prices at very thin margins or at a loss and rely on releasing newer models more often to keep up sales.

Even with standardization, hardware differences will necessitate testing on older devices. That does not come for free for the manufacturers, and it has been, and is seen as, an entirely avoidable and unnecessary expense (which is one big reason they don't provide updates for a longer duration right now). Are the majority of customers even capable of dealing with rooting the phone or flashing it with some un-tested firmware? The phone makers and customers are used to not having updates for a long time, and neither of them really care (if you look at the majority non-tech crowd). Why or how would all these other dynamics change just because SoCs get standardized (if that happens)?

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