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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

#281

Post by rpeden »

pier25 wrote: post #279
rpeden wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still limited in that it's not a good choice if your app requires UI functionality that is very platform specific. I think that's intentional - it isn't intended to be the right solution for every application. It's still a good choice if your app mainly involves displaying lists and tables of text and images, and data entry forms. The cross platform Map control works quite well too. I don't remember exactly what…

Thanks for the info. From what I've seen things haven't changed much. The idea still seems to be that Forms is for simple apps that use a number of common components.

Yeah, it is similar to React Native ins that way. There's a limited set of cross platform components. In both Xamarin and RN, though, you can also include your own platform-specific components/plugins when necessary.

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

#282

Post by Roboprog »

tdkl wrote: post #236
pjmlp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't understand the downvotes on you.

At the end of the day, dear Google is (now) still just a marketing company, however well they may treat the intellect they are hoarding.

Yes, I'm ignoring that Google was founded on some really awesome technological ideas, or at least a very clever assemblage thereof, but monetizing those ideas required becoming a marketing company. Preserving their value means extending that core business throughout what they do.

That said, our personal phone gear at home is Android, cuz I'm cheap. BUT, I'm really getting fed up with all of the damn notices that literally cause my phone to beep several times an hour for nothing. I love my iPad mini - not only can it do web, email and MP3s, it also makes a pretty good (MIDI) synthesizer :-)

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

#283

Post by lmm »

vbezhenar wrote: post #149
seviu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's slow, underdocumented, and unreliable. There are too many ways to do anything, and it's too easy to add a "1-line fix" that does something unmaintainable. It's better than ant, but a lot worse than maven.

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

#284

Post by janekm »

Kudos wrote: post #232
pjmlp wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Actually, I make a point in my iOS projects to avoid third party libraries wherever possible. The first-party SDK is good enough that the dependency cost of libraries like Alamofire is usually not worth it. I had to do some Android development not too long ago, and I felt like I had entered some crazy la-la land until I found a bunch of third party infrastructure like Kotlin, RXJava and a pile of libraries to make life bearable.

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

#285

Post by rcarmo »

pjmlp wrote: post #123
rcarmo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our app built just fine on a 2GB RAM machine with a 64GB SSD.

Ironically, it was my repurposed Chromebook :)

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

#286

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

The gradle and multidex complaints are spot on. Even as an enthusiast developer making my own personal apps for myself, I see this as true. I'm ok with Fragments, Rx makes everything nice.

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

#287

Post by cageface »

cableshaft wrote: post #252
cageface wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also very much the case with iOS. If you just stick to what Apple provides you're going to suffer a lot more than necessary. Libraries and tools like Snapkit, R.swift, Fastlane, and Alamofire sand off so many rough edges on the APIs and Xcode.

Trying not to add dependencies after being burned in the past (cocos2d-swift disappearing was a particularly harsh one), but they all look interesting. R.swift in particular I might have to add. Autocomplete and compile time checking of resources is something I wish was more common in other environments.

R.swift is brilliant. Apple should just write them a check and make it part of Xcode instead of playing cute games with rendering tiny images inline with code.

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

#288

Post by iainmerrick »

krschultz wrote: post #271
iainmerrick wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite experience -- I tried Buck because I really wanted a Blaze/Bazel clone (it wasn't open source at the time). It works but I find it very slow. My project involves lots of native code and genrules, though. If you're mostly building Java code I imagine Buck might work well. If starting from scratch I would try Bazel first.

Buck's speed improvement is heavily dependent on breaking your code into modules. What was your project setup like?

I have 2300 lines in about 40 BUCK files, plus 500 lines in 2 DEFS files. Just parsing the BUCK files seems to take an inordinate amount of time (tens of seconds from cold).

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

#289

Post by jimbokun »

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…

"All-in-all, I honestly think the author didn't really look into Android all that much to have complaints that he had."

The author states pretty plainly the biggest reason for leaving Android development was he didn't have time to keep up with all the developments in both Android and iOS communities.

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

#290

Post by smrtinsert »

lmm wrote: post #283
vbezhenar wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's slow, underdocumented, and unreliable. There are too many ways to do anything, and it's too easy to add a "1-line fix" that does something unmaintainable. It's better than ant, but a lot worse than maven.

Define better? Ant was unquestionably faster and extensible via custom tasks which the Android team could have done.

Gradle will never be a fast build tool due to its design goals. It was a clear mistake to switch to them if you applied any knowledge of build tools.

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