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Android Studio 3.2

android-developers.googleblog.com

71–80 of 84 posts

Re: Android Studio 3.2

#71
post #48

I have used IntelliJ IDEA since the early 2000's and used it for Android development since Android first came out. It used to be an amazing experience, and when the news came out that Google was going to switch to IDEA for their official tools instead of going with that Eclipse I was thrilled. Finally everybody was going to able to know just how fast and efficient Android development can be. How wrong I was. When And…

> I actually lay most of the blame on Gradle, which became mandatory around the same time. I never thought that someone would create a build tool I dislike more than Maven, but it seems they succeeded

Indeed ... most people don't know Groovy and hate Gradle whenever they have to fight with the build file. What's fascinating is that I really like Groovy and know it extremely well - but even I hate Gradle. It's amazing how shiny the documentation looks for how little it explains the underlying principles of what is going on. Most people are two steps removed from any hope of understanding it (first learn Groovy, then realize that Gradle is actually a DSL layered on top of Groovy, so you still have no clue what is going on until you learn that as well ...)

Re: Android Studio 3.2

#72
post #6

I try Android Studio for a bit every now and then. I have to say it's such a giant bloated thing that it really does not make me want to write native code. Fortunately, there is a lot of great stuff going on with Progressive Web Apps now. I hope that they will be the future. Developing for the browser is so much leaner.

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Re: Android Studio 3.2

#73
post #55
post #12

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That does not make sense. Web apps do not consume more resources then websites. And usually less then native apps. I never had them crash any phone.

Too many websites at the same time cause the same issue. If I open a site like cnn.com without an adblocker, all apps running in background (even e.g. spotify if I'm listening to music) are force closed because the phone runs low on RAM. Every website or web app I've used so far has used > 100-200M RAM, while a well developed Android app stays below 20-50M. My phone has 2GB RAM, 1GB is used by the OS, 500-800M are us…

Agreed. The DOM and JavaScript, as used by many heavy websites and web apps, are heavy.

On the other hand, JavaScript in a more constrained environment--React Native, for example--is a lot more reasonable. Still heavier than an Android app, but not so heavy that it kills processes except on very downmarket phones.

Re: Android Studio 3.2

#74
post #61
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maven is very unintuitive though, at least Gradle does a better job on the CLI interface. Hopefully we'll get better options on the JVM in the future.

But you need to edit the Gradle configuration files. Most people simply cargo-cult that, and while that works most of the time, it's incredibly non-intuitive to solve problems.

99% of the time this is just pasting one dependency line into a file, and a Gradle file reads more intuitively than a Maven pom file. IMO performance aside Maven really only excels in edge cases. Most projects would never see any advantages from using Maven instead.

Re: Android Studio 3.2

#75

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Newest windows versions allow running docker and the android emulator side by side,through windows container platform

Do you have a link to show how to do that? Sounds useful, but the only reference I've found to that is to do it from Visual Studio and using Xamarin C# and not 'native' Java.

Once you enable the container platform in windows, and enable the bios setting for virtualization, it should just work, when I get back to my home computer I will look the details

Re: Android Studio 3.2

#76
post #60

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> unless you really need IDE features and that's very often if you are a Java/Android dev. Even features like auto complete (let alone with prediction) is very hard to get right elsewhere, let's say, somewhere like Vim. Not just the language, there's Android SDK itself and other libraries. But, if you count "not needing auto complete etc" as part of "know the language well enough" or that they trivial enough then, we…

> very hard to get right elsewhere I wrote substantial systems before there were any Java IDEs. Nothing hard about it. Write a lot of code and it's easy. If that disturbs you I'm sorry, but you should allow that there are people with more skill than perhaps you've been exposed to.

No, it doesn't disturb me at all. At work and among friends there are people who have more skills than I am exposed to and I get to learn a lot from them. However none of them ever advocate not using an IDE or claim not needing an IDE. In fact a lot of them use one or the other.

I used to write in Vim (C) when I worked for that South Korean giant. After that I moved to Java/Android and I wouldn't get back to those days of Vim/C for anything. So I think it comes down to choice. The thing is GP commenter mentioned "masochism" and now I see the point.

Re: Android Studio 3.2

#77
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer native apps over web apps , but for most things I vastly prefer a website to both of those. I shouldn't have to install an app for every single thing I want to use, especially if I only use the thing once a week or so.

That is what instant apps are for.

As far as I can tell instant apps are just websites that are conveniently (for Google) locked into Googles ecosystem.

Re: Android Studio 3.2

#78
post #5

Do the emulator and compiler still require SSDs and 16GB+ RAM to be usable? I love Android Studio but it used to always feel very heavy-weight.

My AS + Emulator running together is sitting at 3GB RAM. Definitely doesn't need 16GB+

You are probably not counting the Gradle daemon and kotlin compiler daemon. I have seen those grow to 4±GB and ~8GB respectively. Not using Kotlin definitely has advantages for memory usage.

Re: Android Studio 3.2

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to show how to do that? Sounds useful, but the only reference I've found to that is to do it from Visual Studio and using Xamarin C# and not 'native' Java.

Once you enable the container platform in windows, and enable the bios setting for virtualization, it should just work, when I get back to my home computer I will look the details

Alright, so I just made a run of it and verified it all works. As you say, the tutorial from Microsoft is for VS[0], but it actually talks about the android emulator, which is the same thing that Android Studio uses, just make sure you update it to latest, atm it's 27.3.10 Admittedly, the startup time seems a bit longer than with HAXM, but otherwise the emulation is pretty responsive. [0]https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/android/get-started...

Re: Android Studio 3.2

#80
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am talking strictly about Android Studio and not the end results i.e. the apps. Giant? It's smaller than Xcode you know :) Bloated? Yes, so bloated! As an Android developer this is my biggest complaint from the ecosystem after the fragmentation though Google is trying to fix that with Treble but they are just not enough for the Studio. It was amazingly frustrating and pathetic to work with it couple of years back a…

The typical Android development update cycle. - Stable releases of Android Studio are usually followed by complaints of breaking left and right even though they take mounths to get out - Stable releases of Android Support Library usually always have a couple of regressions - Documentation and release notes always gets made available a couple of hours later - Kotlin plugin usually breaks at every release - NDK gets th…

I had to copy the old ndk folder from a colleague's SDK and use it on mine after the update broke everything few weeks ago. I am not touching that thing again. Actually I am preparing myself to leave Android and get into backend dev, will keep in touch with Android dev as a hobby and maybe just to update my little used apps on PlayStore.
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