flutter.
Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
51–60 of 166 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#52Don’t underestimate the value of build tools. Just because you know Xcode and Swift or Android Studio and Kotlin (or their antecedent languages) are you done. Finally having a senior dev who knows what he’s talking about has done more for me in the past two years than the previous 8 of reading blog posts and hacking. He’s shown me the real value of build scripts. Today even my personal iOS projects are dependent on a combination of Swift, Ruby, YAML, and Kotlin to build. It’s complicated to set up but I can prove that my code works.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#53That developing for Android isn’t even as half as smooth as developing for iOS. Yes, with iOS you’re using Xcode and have to set up provisioning for your dev device and all that, but once you’ve done that you’re mostly on your way. UIKit, while not the shiniest thing out there, is quite competent and functional — you can easily write world class apps with it while keeping third party libraries to a minimum. On Androi…
> You’ll spend inordinate amounts of time researching the “right” way to do things only to find that there really isn’t one, but instead several ways with varying levels of wrongness with different trade offs.
From what I've heard Android is unusually bad for this but this particular sentence resonates with me in terms of basically everything ... though that may be because I do a bunch of deployment/ops stuff which is generally entirely made out of "choose your own petard to be hoist by later"
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#54I regret thinking that Xamarin was a good idea.
haha been there, should have left for a different company with our cto thinking xamarin was the best.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. It's not using any native UI widgets or UI code, but drawing everything itself using the lowest level API it can get, which I guess on iOS is Metal (and something for input). This means that the look and feel and the behavior and accessibility features will not match those of other apps (which do use the native toolkits), or the Flutter team will have to do a lot of reverse engineering and re-implementation to m…
Currently, Flutter targets OpenGL ES on iOS which is less than ideal. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/18208
"We were discussing this in today's Triage meeting. Our current plan is to turn Metal on soon. This will increase the size of our engine by ~200KB. We can eventually reduce this by removing the OpenGL code but (a) that would drop support for Seems like it will be solved 'soon'
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#56I regret not knowing that Android API is awful. Then I regret looking into Nativescript, because it was pretty buggy. Then I regret not knowing about Flutter earlier. THEN I regret not knowing that Flutter is pretty buggy as well. Next step is me trying to learn other frameworks, like Cordova or React Native. I wonder what my regrets will be.
Flutter is quite good, what were some of the issues you experienced?
The one PITA for me is state management, but once you understand how to solve that using BLoC or Providers then it should be relatively usable
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#57I regret not knowing that Android API is awful. Then I regret looking into Nativescript, because it was pretty buggy. Then I regret not knowing about Flutter earlier. THEN I regret not knowing that Flutter is pretty buggy as well. Next step is me trying to learn other frameworks, like Cordova or React Native. I wonder what my regrets will be.
Cordova and react native are going to disappoint you for the same reasons.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#58I wish I would have not fought the tools so much.
I started Android programming from the command line using make/ant and testing on a device because I didn't like Android Studio. This ended up wasting a lot of time and energy over the years as I had to integrate more 3rd party libraries (including Google's own crap).
Same thing for iOS. I didn't like building GUIs in Interface Builder so I did everything in code. Over time as iOS devices came in different sizes, this became harder to do properly. I should have given in early and learned to use Interface Builder, auto layout, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#59I wish I would have not fought the tools so much. I started Android programming from the command line using make/ant and testing on a device because I didn't like Android Studio. This ended up wasting a lot of time and energy over the years as I had to integrate more 3rd party libraries (including Google's own crap). Same thing for iOS. I didn't like building GUIs in Interface Builder so I did everything in code. Ove…
Code-only purists are still prominent in the iOS community. Yeah, there’s definitely baggage one must take on when using IB but the ease of being able to instantly preview your layout in different sizes is the big seller for me.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#60On the iOS side, I regret not knowing how horrible Xcode is and how horrible Apple's documentation is. On the Android side, I regret not realizing that no matter what kind of slick new well documented APIs Google releases we will all be writing code for Android 4.4 for the rest of our lives. Also, I wish I knew mobile developers are some of the lowest paid developers other than game industry peons.
> I wish I knew mobile developers are some of the lowest paid developers other than game industry peons.
Everything is relative of course, but can you back up your claim with some numbers?
Where do you live? What salaries and compensation packages are you seeing?