It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by vetinari » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 12:40 PM UTC

0xFFC wrote: post #176

macco wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt that. By the way, I think Android UI works much better than iOS's.

>By the way, I think Android UI works much better than iOS's. You should be specific about what about Android UI is better than iOS? if you are saying android UI design is better than iOS , I agree , but remember Material design is not android's design. Google wants to expend to every platform, it is quite childish if we think they could expand to every platform without having professional UI design language for them…

UI is not only design, but also UX.

One of big Android advantages are activities and intents. It allows for application cooperation in a way that's not possible on iPhone. Even the default app concept is based on intent handling - and that's why I can use Firefox as my default browser, Nine as my default mail app and Sygic as my default navigation and send stuff from other apps over Threema. On iPhone, I would be stuck with Safari/Apple mail/Apple maps/iMessage no matter what others offer.

This also affects integration from third parties. There's no reason for an app to support just Dropbox, when there are intents, that all other services support. Unless you want to artificially limit the integration, or you came from iOS and are not used to that.

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

#232

Post by Kudos » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 12:41 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #162

izacus wrote: post #141

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…

> Just like the web platform, Android is hugely improved when you leverage the community libraries and tools they provided. Which speaks a lot about the quality of work provided by the platform owner, when the community needs to step up.

No it doesn't it's the same on iOS.

Apple didn't come up with dependency/package managers like Carthage or Cocoapods, the community did. There's just enormous amounts of OSS libraries provided by the community too, with ones like Alamofire smoothing out the rough edges of iOS's networking APIs.

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

#233

Post by vetinari » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 12:51 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #198

seibelj wrote: post #9

Unless you are writing a Tier 1 application that needs every fancy do-hicky, I don't see the point of 100% native anymore. Use React Native, then if necessary have a devoted native developer for each platform to handle parts that absolutely have to be executed in native and provide a JavaScript API. If you are a big company with tons of money, sure, create duplicate teams to make the same app for each platform. But i…

I have an Ubuntu phone, where the majority of stuff is web based. One problem I noticed is that many apps won't load unless you are connected to the internet. Is it possible to cache the stuff that would get loaded for using apps offline?

Yes, but the app developers have to do it when developing the app. It involves app manifest and service workers.

At this years Google I/O, there were talks how to do that (in the Chrome track).

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

#234

Post by lucasarruda » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 12:52 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #141

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 guess his point is not that Android platform hasn't improved, but the effort itself to develop for it versus developing for iOS platform.

Cost benefit also is probably lot better on the iOS side ($$$ you get to develop an app / time to develop it).

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

#235

Post by mmargerum » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 12:54 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #141

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…

> you certanly have missed a lot of progress in the last few years.

I think that's kind of his point. He was spreads too thin.

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

#236

Post by tdkl » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 12:57 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #88

RivieraKid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 would expect more from Google. I completely agree and although I only do it as a hobby, there are lots of points that many in the community feel as pain. - They never managed to write a proper working emulator, while other companies had no problem doing so; - The whole debacle of C++ support, had JetBrains not decided to create CLion, to this…

> They seem to just keep Android on some kind of "just good enough" for the masses.

Android exists to collect data and serves as an ad platform. iOS exists to sell hardware.

The quality of the dev tools and on-boarding reflects that.

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

#237

Post by blumomo » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 1:01 PM UTC

m_fayer wrote: post #177

cel1ne wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, that's why I don't use fragments at all and do all my multithreading in the way of communicating sequential processes: via BlockingQueue communication to hand-written background threads / services. The trick with Android-development really is to acknowledge that large parts of the SDK are just crap and that you are better served writing custom code than trying to use it.

I agree completely. After a while I abandoned fragments completely and started using custom views everywhere. Life got much easier and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop - decreased maintainability, performance, robustness... something would bite me in the ass for "going my own way." But the shoe never dropped, life did get easier. Lesson learned.

Thanks for sharing your experience with using custom views only. These views would then simply act as the view controller I guess, having not much presentation logic. I was always having this in my head but then I never tried it out so far. Are you going even that far to use one Activity per app only?

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

#238

Post by wccrawford » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 1:03 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #198

seibelj wrote: post #9

Unless you are writing a Tier 1 application that needs every fancy do-hicky, I don't see the point of 100% native anymore. Use React Native, then if necessary have a devoted native developer for each platform to handle parts that absolutely have to be executed in native and provide a JavaScript API. If you are a big company with tons of money, sure, create duplicate teams to make the same app for each platform. But i…

I have an Ubuntu phone, where the majority of stuff is web based. One problem I noticed is that many apps won't load unless you are connected to the internet. Is it possible to cache the stuff that would get loaded for using apps offline?

React Native isn't web-based. It's a way to create native widgets but the library works like the React library for Javascript.

So there's no worries about being online or offline, just from using React Native.

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

#239

Post by winter_blue » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 1:05 PM UTC

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…

Is Java really that hard a language to learn?

I've found, from experience[1], that large code bases written in statically typed languages like Java tend to be much more easier to read, understand -- which is extremely critical when working with a team. I use Python for a lot of my personal projects, but for a team project, I would rather use Java than Python.

[1] Explained in detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12594616

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

#240

Post by veeti » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 1:12 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #99

dlubarov wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any Android Studio generated project will do. Dual core with 8 GB, 500 GB HD, perfectly fine for Eclipse, Visual Studio, MSBuild, Ant, Maven. No need for performance tricks like Gradle requires.

> 500 GB HD

Do yourself a favor and get an SSD.