161–170 of 342 posts
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You are right, and also reminded me that if you check the AOSP commits, they are in the process of adding a new one built with Go.
And then the toolchain dies completely after splintering and exploding? Time to bypass Google and just use plain old cmake instead. So far, it is still possible to just run java+dex or jack straight from command line...
Just like the web platform, Android is hugely improved when you leverage the community libraries and tools they provided. Gradle actually helps a lot with that, since its clear dependency management makes use of external libraries a breeze. If in 2016 you're still complaining about AsyncTasks and its management, you certanly have missed a lot of progress in the last few years. It's not unlike having people complain a…
Which speaks a lot about the quality of work provided by the platform owner, when the community needs to step up.
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> 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.
I'm currently working on a way to make our mobile-tailored website into an app, just because customers keep requesting a _real_ app instead of a webpage.
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> 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 think it is mostly have to do with company's talent pool and focus. As far as I can see (I may be wrong, this is my estimate) Google tries hard to devote best talents to 1) ads and Search and it's maintaining 2) Chrome team 3) Google apps and services online and on iPhones. After these option they try to develop Android as kinda (I don't know w…
By the way, I think Android UI works much better than iOS's.
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 was surprised to learn that Android in 2016 doesn't even natively come with an equivalent of JavascriptCore. You have the pleasure of somehow getting V8 to run and then serialize/deserialize all your native objects manually in order to talk to it if you want javascript outside the browser. Really? From the company that is the most web native around, and even developed the most common browserless JS runtime (V8)? Go…
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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…
I wonder, what's wrong with Gradle? I didn't develop for Android, but I use Gradle for plain Java projects and it's greatest build tool I've ever worked with. It's even better than Maven. Is it because of bad Android plugins?
Google suggestions to ease the problems are to have a background daemon, using a JVM with at least 2GB allocated to it.
Ant and Maven don't require any of this stuff to perform fast builds.
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> The only thing worse than gradle is ANT, which it replaced. What's wrong with ant? I liked it.. It was simple to understand for the most part. It also made it easy to develop without an IDE, although I'll admit I don't know how easy it is now as I stopped doing Android a year ago
And that's about all it does. Gradle has proper dependency managment with Maven repository support (add one line and your library is in, no fsckery with JARs and whatnot), has scripting in an imperative language instead of craziness of XML (we use it to automate releases, uploads, Git commits, etc.) and really good plugin support. It's also slow as arse unfortunately.
Android should drop Java. It's nothing like writing 'normal' Java, and the baggage that is bought along isn't worth the effort. I like Java. I hate Android development.
Other than the slightly different standard libraries, what else is different? Android Java is effectively the same as java 7, and any difference is solely attributed to library/SDK/api.
This will only get worse when Java 9, specially Java 10 gets released.
Just like the web platform, Android is hugely improved when you leverage the community libraries and tools they provided. Gradle actually helps a lot with that, since its clear dependency management makes use of external libraries a breeze. If in 2016 you're still complaining about AsyncTasks and its management, you certanly have missed a lot of progress in the last few years. It's not unlike having people complain a…
I think you just proved the point of the author. I haven't done any app development yet, but from how you describe it, it seems to be as hard to keep up with it as with the JS ecosystem. No wonder then that the author has trouble keeping up with two entirely distinct ecosystems, and chooses to focus on only one. (That said, I'm very glad that this is the top-voted comment, since it looks like a very valuable resource…
The only exception is Kotlin as a language, which is pretty new and the tooling is still improving. You're not going to hurt TOO much if you stay with Java6 though.
Remember, we at the end of the day we're all just old Java farts and we like our stability ;)
Just like the web platform, Android is hugely improved when you leverage the community libraries and tools they provided. Gradle actually helps a lot with that, since its clear dependency management makes use of external libraries a breeze. If in 2016 you're still complaining about AsyncTasks and its management, you certanly have missed a lot of progress in the last few years. It's not unlike having people complain a…
* and its friends * and its management * by its scripting language