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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

#121

Post by seviu »

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.…

Moving to Gradle was a terrible mess. Ant was simple, effective and fast. Even now every time I fire up an Android build with gradle my laptop feels like it is going to fly.

However Android has come a long way since the early days. The author focuses on the bad things we all know about. Android development is incrementally getting better every month.

On top of that Android Studio is a way better development tool than Xcode. To the point that I wish Apple drops Xcode completely and starts using AppCode.

- Android Studio has powerful refactoring tools. Xcode lets you do some basic refactoring only on Objective C

- Despite gradle being a pain, it gives you dependency management. To get that on iOS you have to resort to third party tools like cocoapods or carthage (though swift has now one too)

- Autocomplete works reliably, every single time

- Translations are way easier to do. Android studio comes with a translation editor and translations are in one place. I welcome you to try to translate a storyboard on Xcode and maintain that.

- Android Studio UI editor is now way better than what it used to be. Despite that, Interface Builder is still the king of UI editors.

- Editing the UI XML is trivial on Android. Try to merge a storyboard or a xib... and Android Studio does not automatically modify your UI xml files every time you open them.

- Signing on Android is a thing you configure once and that's it. I have wasted days dealing with signing problems on iOS.

- Etc...

However I enjoy more doing iOS development. I cannot explain why, it is a more pleasant experience. At least to me.

I still love both platforms anyway.

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

#123

Post by pjmlp »

rcarmo wrote: post #102
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?…

I tried to use gradle when I moved one of our apps to Android Studio for a few tweaks and updates - ended up using Ant and Visual Studio Code instead, such was the slowness and pain of the whole thing.

I started to think that Google employees on Android Studio team are using something like hexacore Xeons with 64 GB and 1TB SSD as their development machine.

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

#125

Post by facepalm »

amelius wrote: post #118

I'm not an Android developer, but I've seen my Android phone and tablet greatly deteriorate in performance over the last couple of years, mostly due to Android updates which were forced on me. I rarely use my tablet anymore because of this.

That is the same with all computer platforms, though. I think it is OK if companies have a limited time of support for their OS, but you can debate how long it should be. With Android, it is also the responsibility of the phone manufacturers, not just Android/Google alone.

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

#126

Post by ghans »

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…

Why is Google considered an IT company?

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

#127

Post by e40 »

amelius wrote: post #118

I'm not an Android developer, but I've seen my Android phone and tablet greatly deteriorate in performance over the last couple of years, mostly due to Android updates which were forced on me. I rarely use my tablet anymore because of this.

I've heard this from a lot of family and friends, and they almost always get the performance back when they reset the device and all the apps are reinstalled. A friend just did it with his Note 4 (or 5, not sure which).

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

#128

Post by wingerlang »

naiyt wrote: post #73
copperx wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Maybe I don't get what's better about React Native over a native app that is just a web view. It's better because React Native is actually rendering native components. Stuff like PhoneGap never feels or works quite right as a side effect of being rendered in a web view.

I think his point is - why make a native app that just re-renders the data which you can just as well look at in a browser.

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

#129

Post by e40 »

facepalm wrote: post #125
amelius wrote: post #118

I'm not an Android developer, but I've seen my Android phone and tablet greatly deteriorate in performance over the last couple of years, mostly due to Android updates which were forced on me. I rarely use my tablet anymore because of this.

That is the same with all computer platforms, though. I think it is OK if companies have a limited time of support for their OS, but you can debate how long it should be. With Android, it is also the responsibility of the phone manufacturers, not just Android/Google alone.

This is certainly true of Windows (which I don't use anymore on the desktop). Until as late as Windows 7, I would do a wipe/install every couple of years, just to get my performance back to the way it was after a fresh install.

I haven't done with this macOS, but I've heard of people doing this.

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