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

#311

Post by omegaworks » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 7:09 AM UTC

taplogger wrote: post #262

chickenbane wrote: post #83

I do not think writing Android apps is straight-forward and would not recommend it to new developers or engineers like the author who want to do other things like iOS. People's expectations for apps is only getting higher, and there are many, many things you need to understand in order to be a produce great Android apps. As an example, another commenter noted the Android platform engineers not being opinionated about…

> So yes, you do need to understand the new functional reactive approach. You need to know how to write a Gradle build. You have to understand the complexities of proguard rules. It's all pretty frustrating. But I also feel that many of the skills are more easily transferrable - I can also write a Gradle build for a library or I can use IntelliJ to better debug a servlet. With Swift and iOS, there's only vendor you c…

Any resources you'd recommend in particular to learn FRP and how it applies to Android, specifically.

As a frequently frustrated intermediate developer I'd greatly appreciate it. I've just begun using RxJava and Robospice to tame my server endpoint call logic, but I know it's just the tip of the iceberg.

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

#312

Post by grey-area » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 8:03 AM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #93

0xFFC wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just Google it. http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12109832/google-apps-iphone... There is so much articles and news about it. It is completely rational decision. Google like any other company at the end wants to maximize its profit, and iPhone is where the money is (Google it, 84% of profit of whole market goes to apples pocket_ I don't remember exact number). I have used HTC desire around 2011 (I don't remember the e…

This is not a problem with android or google. The only way you can avoid this update problem is to convince ARM SoC manufacturers to standardise their SoCs instead of cooking their own soup every time. I think this is never going to happen. Apple doesn't need to standardise. They can get away with just supporting their own devices.

This is not a problem with android or google.

It may not be their fault, but it is their problem. This is a huge problem for Android as a platform.

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

#313

Post by tluyben2 » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 9:27 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #190

TheCoreh wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL incompatibility issue has nothing to do with Apple not allowing emulators. (After all there are BSD/MIT emulators) They don't want (non-sandboxed) interpreters running unreviewed code. Right now the only interpreter allowed to be used with downloaded code is webkit's JS JIT.

There are multiple reasons as I said: one is the one you say but some emulators I use are under the GPL and use many GPL libs. But yes the other restriction sucks too. The point was cannot normally use emulators under iOS which stands, whatever the reason may be.

For instance [0] which I use by far the most has both problems; however with another license the runtime issues would be fixable. For instance, recompile the runtime with emscripten. Luckily there is webmsx now which looks promising, but that is not there yet.

[0] https://github.com/openMSX/openMSX

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

#314

Post by nodamage » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 9:45 AM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #273

chinhodado wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think Activity lifecycle management is complex. Then I learned about Fragments and I started to loathe every moment I have to work with them. What a bloated mess: http://staticfree.info/~steve/complete_android_fragment_life...

And then there are nested fragments and all the caveats associated with them, but it's all good, it just requires some simple fixes everyone could come up off the top of their head, like http://stackoverflow.com/a/23276145/168719 (the top voted answer) It's good, because it doesn't require you to use the workaround of deluding the user with a SCREENSHOT of your layout (sic; see the accepted answer above).

Good lord. How absurd that this is even necessary in the first place.

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

#315

Post by m_fayer » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 11:28 AM UTC

blumomo wrote: post #237

m_fayer wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No I have several activities, but they're very coarse-grained. Similar to how a large SPA may consist of a grand total of 3 or 4 pages, and routing works within pages, not just between them.

Also, I'm currently using this technique with Xamarin, which opens up some techniques that would be hard to pull off with native. So in this case I use an Angular-style MVVM pattern, so the custom views are all bound to corresponding viewmodels. So the custom views all share one small piece of code that takes care of some binding-related plumbing, and otherwise they're nothing but AXML with binding statements in it. This adds up to a rather pleasing approximation of a web-frontend-style component-based architecture. Xamarin should really be more popular!

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

#316

Post by nurettin » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 12:16 PM UTC

I've recently been dabbling with the new android studio 2.x and It has improved considerably in the past 3 months.

For a single application all I need is:

- A main activity where I commit fragments to show stuff

- A settings activity foryouknowwhat

- A main application class to store all the data and state

- Some model classes for downloading/parsing/storing/data

- A service that can be used from my main activity and notification manager

I've been at it for a few months and the experience hasn't been as terrible as described. (Yes I do have async tasks that update the UI)

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

#317

Post by BoorishBears » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #273

chinhodado wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think Activity lifecycle management is complex. Then I learned about Fragments and I started to loathe every moment I have to work with them. What a bloated mess: http://staticfree.info/~steve/complete_android_fragment_life...

And then there are nested fragments and all the caveats associated with them, but it's all good, it just requires some simple fixes everyone could come up off the top of their head, like http://stackoverflow.com/a/23276145/168719 (the top voted answer) It's good, because it doesn't require you to use the workaround of deluding the user with a SCREENSHOT of your layout (sic; see the accepted answer above).

Support fragments "fixed" nested fragments a little while back, or so they claimed in a change log.

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

#318

Post by colund » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

I think it's good to remember that it goes both ways https://twitter.com/devunwired/status/786542912469213184

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

#319

Post by PopsiclePete » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 8:26 PM UTC

cloudjacker wrote: post #295

janekm wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

> Actually, I make a point in my iOS projects to avoid third party libraries wherever possible. Thats not a bragging point.

DRY can be taken to extremes. It is ok to sometimes write code yourself than to tie yourself and depend on some other library by "some guy". The whole NPM "left pad" debacle is proof of that.

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

#320

Post by rhizome » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 8:56 PM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #20

rhizome wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. How can there then be all of these weekend tossoff games in the Play Store that work just fine? Unless I'm unclear on what you mean by "platform."

An app that uses native UI widgets is very different from a game which uses a graphics engine. The game compiles cross-platform with minimal changes.

Sure, but I think I'm still unclear on "platform" here. Does it mean "Android" and "iOS" (et al), or does each of those have multiple platforms within them?