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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

#131

Post by brad0 »

nextos wrote: post #30
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…

I hated the current incarnation of mobile too. Never owned a smartphone aside from Maemo / Meego Nokias. But I've found some peace using Android without the mothership. That's CopperheadOS with F-droid: https://guardianproject.info/2016/03/28/copperhead-guardian-... It's simple and it works well. But yeah, things are a bit messy from a development perspective. Too much fragmentation I guess.

s/fragmentation/fragments/

FTFY ;)

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

#132

Post by antocv »

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.

Same experience here.

My battery lasted from 100% in the morning down to about 15-20% just after lunch. Thats crazy.

Then I removed all Google apps, Play services, everything to do with Google gone, wiped with a reinstall. Replaced with free open source alternatives, such as OsmAnd and K-9 Mail.

Now the battery lasts 2 days! Yes, 2 whole days! Yesterday morning I had a full charge, now more than 24 hours later it is still at 46%.

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

#133

Post by gjolund »

cel1ne wrote: post #110
gjolund wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an excellent comment, and it mirrors my experience with android also. Most of the responses Ive gotten from coworkers is "what would you change". I have a hard time answering that.

If one were allowed to break backward compatibility I could come up with a list of changes easily.

But that is the crux of the problem isn't it?

Device/OS proliferation has made android dev pretty complicated these days.

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

#134

Post by newscracker »

z3t4 wrote: post #113

I see two types of dev methods 1) Write it all down, read through the code a few times. Then compile and do a full test. 2) Write in steps, compile and test after each step. The later is a Pita on low level. And produce more bugs.

Regardless of the platform, for any application with a non-trivial amount of complexity, iterative development is the best approach. I don't understand how anyone could "write it all down, read through the code a few times and test" and not produce a buggier application that doesn't meet most expectations. It does help to do some initial design work, create abstractions, loose coupling, etc. Iterative development does not mean jumping into coding without a high level plan on how to create the application pieces and how things would work (or do what's called as "cowboy coding").

With the amount of complexity involved in developing applications, considering the architecture, design, interactions between application components, error handling, different classes of platform APIs, UI, UX, state management, concurrency, hardware configurations to support, and many other things, I doubt if any human could really keep all that in one's head and really work through all the possible ways that assumptions during coding would get beaten, when compared to a real execution of the application and using that practical feedback in changing, fixing and improving things.

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

#135

Post by vardump »

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…

> Developers do need to pick a set of core technologies, and stick to it or a career can fall apart I bet.

Over time any set of "core technologies" will be legacy and your career will be over. In this business, you'll always need to absorb and learn new ideas, platforms, technologies, languages, etc. or eventually you'll have to do something else.

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

#137

Post by tn13 »

When I started development on Android platform I was told that we should not do IO on UI thread. Fine enough. What is the alternative? Every tutorial out there including Google's suggested AsyncTask.

Only after few weeks I learned that we should never use AsyncTask for IO because internally it uses a threadpool of hold your breath 2 threads !

So how do I make all my REST requests ? Through something like Volley. This library is even more disgusting as it does not support some simple urls such as http://example.org/?id=1&id=2.

So I turned by focus on Services only to learn later that Services are meant for background tasks but run on UI thread.

The best approach to do your own IO is through IntentServices. Something that should have appeared in the first tutorial.

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

#138

Post by vardump »

AstralStorm wrote: post #111
fractalwrench wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> why does it zip the whole thing again

Maybe fragmented zip files with holes inside are undesired? Because that's what you get when modifying zip files in-place.

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

#139

Post by gagabity »

As an Android only Dev I cant disagree with any of his reasons, the tools especially are just terrible, its not unusual to spend hours trying to figure out why my project will not build, this is compounded if you live in a country with poor internet connectivity, GB sized updates to the tools are not fun.

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

#140

Post by cel1ne »

gjolund wrote: post #133
cel1ne wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one were allowed to break backward compatibility I could come up with a list of changes easily.

But that is the crux of the problem isn't it? Device/OS proliferation has made android dev pretty complicated these days.

Yes, it's the new windows.

I think some things like replacing bitfields with Enums could maybe be done transparently with a little ART modification.

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