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Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

android-developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

#51

Post by noir_lord »

emidln wrote: post #20
gammateam wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android developers get around 3-5 years before they stop rationalizing the potential and ditch that ecosystem. Apple won this battle. The actual android users that "can't stand Apple and need control" have no clue what they are missing anymore. They haven't looked at Apple since 2013. Unlike Blackberry faithful, Android users really do have great more advanced technology on paper, but look, nobody cares.

Sample size 1 here. I used an iPhoneX for a few months this year. It was my first iPhone, and I loathed the browser lock-in and the lack of automatic contacts sync. The UX is far less consistent than modern Android apps (e.g. the back functionality out of an app). I missed my app drawer as well. The iPhone was free from work, yet I paid out of pocket for a Galaxy S9+ so I could go back to Android.

I'm slowly joining that group, I bought a iPad mini for testing and it worked so effortlessly I bought the 2018 iPad with a pencil.

Outside of work stuff where I care I just want things to do their job and stay out the way.

Re: Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

#52

Post by izacus »

knuththetruth wrote: post #34
izacus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way you get only 12% installation share on Oreo is if you're targeting Indian continent with Hindi localisation. For a western world targeted app, the stats are around 35-40% for Oreo right now. So you seem to be deliberately ignoring your own installation stats just to complain - the dashboard you're posted is pretty much not relevant for anyone but multi-million installation apps like Facebook. In other wo…

Conflating a very real and common concern (fragmentation in the android market) with “toxicity” seems a bit excessive.

The OP wrote a post which has nothing to do with article at hand and is deliberately misleading. I think the term is fitting - it's complaining for complaining's sake. And that's toxic in a community. Compare it with the frontend developers - dealing with Android fragmentation is signficantly easier than dealing with browser and device fragmentation as a web developer... and those topics aren't full of people complaining.

Re: Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

#53

Post by weitzj »

akerro wrote: post #49
izacus wrote: post #26

It's rather sad to see how none of the comments here are actually commenting on Android P/Kotlin friendliness. (Which is available to all Android developers, not only those targeting P - the nullability headers will give you all the benefits even if your app supports older Androids.)

I actually wish there was an Android release targeted for Dart support with more Dart promotion. Since this year Java got a lot more powers, they're moving the language and ecosystem much faster, functional targets for Java 12 (will be released in 2019) contain almost everything Kotlin has now.

But then it depends how much is dependent on changes on the JVM and how much will get into the Android VM. This nice thing of Kotlin is that you get a nice language which is JVM 6 compatible and thus supported on most Android platforms. The last information I have from Android is that you can use partially features from Java7/JVM7 but not all of them.

Re: Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

#54

Post by oakesm9 »

j16sdiz wrote: post #46
0x0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been tons of subtle and not so subtle breaking changes from bumping targetSdkVersion, many that only manifests at runtime. Things like runtime-permission-grants, three iterations of C2DM, GCM, FCM, notification handling, inner classes in activities and fragments, background processing, NDK changes, etc etc. If you have a low-churn legacy but still useful app, coming back every year and between the subtle api…

GCM is being removed by google. You have to migrate to FCM anyway. This is unrelated to the targetSdkVersion.

And it's a very small change on the app side to make the switch. It's essentially the same service but rebranded.

Re: Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

#55

Post by wastedhours »

akerro wrote: post #49
izacus wrote: post #26

It's rather sad to see how none of the comments here are actually commenting on Android P/Kotlin friendliness. (Which is available to all Android developers, not only those targeting P - the nullability headers will give you all the benefits even if your app supports older Androids.)

I actually wish there was an Android release targeted for Dart support with more Dart promotion. Since this year Java got a lot more powers, they're moving the language and ecosystem much faster, functional targets for Java 12 (will be released in 2019) contain almost everything Kotlin has now.

Yeah, I was expecting to see Dart given more prominence, but guessing the momentum Kotlin has and the comparative ease of moving that way from pure Java, the timings still aren't working out.

Am only tinkering at the moment, but my excitement for Flutter means any push in the Dart direction is good for me.

Re: Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

#56

Post by jillesvangurp »

akerro wrote: post #49
izacus wrote: post #26

It's rather sad to see how none of the comments here are actually commenting on Android P/Kotlin friendliness. (Which is available to all Android developers, not only those targeting P - the nullability headers will give you all the benefits even if your app supports older Androids.)

I actually wish there was an Android release targeted for Dart support with more Dart promotion. Since this year Java got a lot more powers, they're moving the language and ecosystem much faster, functional targets for Java 12 (will be released in 2019) contain almost everything Kotlin has now.

Given the legal wrangling with Oracle, I don't think they will be eager to support Java. However, Kotlin has a native compiler (llvm based) as well. You can target Android/IOS with it as well as Wasm or simple desktop/server executables. So, the smart move would be to deemphasize Dart, move flutter on top of Kotlin native/llvm (and why not expose it to other languages as well; e.g. swift). Then they cab move the entire Android ecosystem on top of llvm and provide some level of continuity for people with Kotlin/Android codebases.

The main challenge here is the API gap between the old java 6 APIs that underly the current Android API that won't be there on native Kotlin. Flutter solves that problem.

Re: Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

#57

Post by cryptos »

drb91 wrote: post #2

I really wish they used version numbers rather than names so i can tell there’s a new version of android. I thought this was a just a distro for raspberry pis. It’s pretty clear in the article though, no sweat :)

I hate this with Ubuntu, too. And then you see that you systems since are supported and you have to google to find out the actual Ubuntu release number and compare it to that of the target system. Annoying!

Re: Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

#58

Post by __sr__ »

izacus wrote: post #13
spbaar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this matter? What apis are you using that are not available in Lollipop, which has 88%+ market share. Also, those dashboards are misleading. For the North American market the proportion of older phones is less than half of what the dashboard displays

For any kind of app targeting westen world (meaning - it's not localised into Hindi, African and Chinese languages), the market share of Lollipop will be below 20%. According to most app stats I've seen (mine and others), Android 6.0+ is pretty much on 80%+, with Oreo nearing 40% since Samsung started rollouts.

> For any kind of app targeting westen world (meaning - it's not localised into Hindi, African and Chinese languages), the market share of Lollipop will be below 20%.

Where exactly are you getting this data from? Please do not put random numbers without citing sources.

Re: Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

#59

Post by owl57 »

georgemcbay wrote: post #21
spbaar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this matter? What apis are you using that are not available in Lollipop, which has 88%+ market share. Also, those dashboards are misleading. For the North American market the proportion of older phones is less than half of what the dashboard displays

I'm not the OP, but there are some changes to background execution limits that can have a fairly large impact on older-than-Oreo apps if you build against SDK 26: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background You've been able to avoid dealing with these changes for a while now by simply building against an older SDK, but Google is in the process of restricting the ability to put any app built with an o…

> existing apps won't be able to update to new APKs using older SDKs starting in November

So, some developers will probably defer handling the changes until November, and then if there is some critical bug (security or otherwise) they won't be able to just fix the bug without also building the rest of the app with the new SDK as is, broken/untested even if it compiles?

Re: Android Pie SDK is now more Kotlin-friendly

#60

Post by whyagaindavid »

ilove_banh_mi wrote: post #5

I'm giving up on upgrading my apps for Android. The releases are dividing the market every single year and consequently steadily eroding sales. On the one hand Google's Nexus was released 3 years ago and is now obsolete; on the other hand Apple's iPhone 5s was released 5 years ago and gets to run iOS 12. On top of this, the vast majority of my paying customers use iOS, not Android (a variety of lifestyle and referenc…

>On the one hand Google's Nexus was released 3 years ago and is now obsolete; on >the other hand Apple's iPhone 5s was released 5 years ago and gets to run iOS 12.

Which nexus u mean? Nexus 5x got oreo. Reg iPhone 5s, though u get iOS 12, if you use it as daily driver - I mean with maps/browser/uber/whatapp/fb/instagram like a common user does it grinds to a halt. Sure my boss has no apps just uses EMail/calling on a iPhone SE (5) still slow with iOS 11. YMMV. Whether u hate or love android is here to stay and consumers love it. Most people do not use the phones so long (sadly)!

>On top of this, the vast majority of my paying customers use iOS, not Android (a

Valid point. To make money then go for iOS.

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