211–220 of 342 posts
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.
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I think you're right. Or at least, they're not devoting a certain kind of talent to Android. Look at Google's efforts on web frontend - GWT, Polymer, Angular 1/2, embracing TypeScript, RxJS, and so on. In other words, they've devoted significant resources to high-level application patterns, emerging paradigms, and in general - improving developer experience. The Chrome devtools are another example. On Android, not on…
I wonder how much that has to do with Android originating from outside Google. Never mind that Google may well be Apple's biggest hardware customer (the Chromebook Pixel seems to have been an attempt at getting employees off their Macbook addiction). There seems to have been something of a civil war right around the launch of Android Honeycomb/3.0, as that was also when Chromebooks happened. All of a sudden you had t…
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I'm not sure about the meaningful distinction here. Programming on any platform will be greatly improved by using good (preferrably opensource) libraries. What difference does it make who made them and why? It's such a strange nitpick.
Because outside the startup world, in many enterprises developers are only allowed to use sanctioned libraries outside what the platform owner advises as best practices. So everyone suffers when anything more complex than hello world already required third party libraries, specially ones that aren't even acknowledged by Google.
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I wonder how much that has to do with Android originating from outside Google. Never mind that Google may well be Apple's biggest hardware customer (the Chromebook Pixel seems to have been an attempt at getting employees off their Macbook addiction). There seems to have been something of a civil war right around the launch of Android Honeycomb/3.0, as that was also when Chromebooks happened. All of a sudden you had t…
It's been over a decade and over 10 major releases since Google acquired Android. If they still haven't managed to completely absorb it, culturally and technically, then I've underestimated just how dysfunctional Google is.
I seem to recall that he was the one that insisted that Android was for phones, and thus devices without a mobile radio was unable to get a CDD certification.
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…
Ever since i picked up a Nokia N800 back in the day, my go to setup has been a featurephone with bluetooth and a "smart device". Thus if i need a net connection right damn now, i can pair the smart device with the featurephone and get online.
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…
Try Xamarin [0] or the newcomer flutter [1]. It's such a pain in the ass to dev in raw android or raw ios, use multi platform sdks.
And if you start with xamarin, you can target windows phone too, even if nobody cares ;-)
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Because outside the startup world, in many enterprises developers are only allowed to use sanctioned libraries outside what the platform owner advises as best practices. So everyone suffers when anything more complex than hello world already required third party libraries, specially ones that aren't even acknowledged by Google.
A self inflicted restriction doesn't make a language bad.
Also the Android operating system isn't a language.
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> 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.
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Uhh, is there a platform there that isn't greatly improved by community libraries? At PSPDFKit we use a lot of additional third party tools and libraries on iOS as well, C++ practically needs community libraries to be usable, Python's biggest strength is in its excellent OSS library community, Ruby as well... I mean, yeah, in perfect world we'd all have neatly packaged by Google, we'd write 6 lines of code and have t…
C++ isn't a platform with a platform owner. Python's biggest strength that lead to its adoption was being a language with "Batteries Included".