"Android Tools Are Horrendous, OS Is Hideous," FB iPhone Dev Joe Hewitt Tweets

Reading his comments, he sounds like many developers when faced with tools they aren't accustomed to using languages they aren't competent at: Instead of acknowledging confusion and ignorance (in the polite way of saying it), turn it into criticisms of the externals.

Look at virtually everyone new to JavaScript and web development as a great example of this. Even brilliant minds, when first introduced to the surprisingly powerful JavaScript, post diatribes of dislike for it.

For instance consider-

"A bit surprised how many hoops I have to jump through to do asynchronous HTTP on Android. NSURLConnection+delegate was so easy."

So how does one do asynchronous HTTP on Android?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/828280/is-there-an-accept...

Is that hard? What hoops are there? It is extraordinarily straightforward, and is built such that you are essentially the commander and chief of a centralized asynchronous mechanism. But yes, if you look for it to be exactly like you've done it before, it might seem Byzantine.

Android has a tremendous number of quirks and imperfections, but I see no reason why Joe Hewitt's opinion is of any significance.

Android allows you to install apps from any source; people in other countries can sell apps through other channels. Can't do that on the iPhone.

I think as Android becomes more established as the standard smartphone OS, Google will be able to exert more influence on carriers and manufacturers by withholding the Google apps and Market when certain conditions are not met. I hope that Google uses this influence to encourage the production of devices that are easy to get software updates for, and lacking customizations that the user can't remove or turn off.

As for Java, it is my impression that most JVM languages can be used on Android, though dynamic languages suffer a bit on startup time. Scala seems like a good option here.

Just ordered my phone yesterday so I guess I'll find out for myself soon!

There are a lot of things about Android that are annoying. Sadly, Java is far from the most annoying thing for me. Besides, if you want to write in something besides Java, you have more hope on Android than iOS at this point [1].

The most annoying thing to me is the lack of a really good equivalent to Interface Builder. Building UI's in XML is tedious and error-prone.

Along those lines, there seems to be a problem with doing the XML layouts in Eclipse. There have been reports suggesting that the layout tool is creating a memory leak which eventually leads to the 20-seconds-to-switch-tabs problem.

There are things I definitely prefer about Android versus iOS, like the Activity/Intent framework. I feel that it encourages a much more modular design.

The code signing and deployment process is also much easier on Android.

I also like XmlPullParser slightly better than NSXMLParser (though the performance might be worse), but that's just a personal preference. And if you really want a SAX parser, you have that in Android too.

IMO, on both platforms you'll be pulling a bit of hair out

[1] Mark Murphy's commonsware site has a 0.4 version of a book called Android Beyond Java with an incomplete chapter on writing apps in Scala. I've never tried writing an Android app in Scala, so caveat emptor. I am also aware of some efforts to get Clojure on Dalvik, but I understand that it is very slow out of the box due to reflection.