Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

Post by billfruit » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 4:31 AM UTC

applecrazy wrote: post #61

McDev wrote: post #24

I'm a self taught programmer and started developing for Android in 2012. It took me a while before I realised that you needed third party libraries to do absolutely anything useful as the platform APIs were so poor and undocumented. There were gaps everywhere and you needed to write tons of boilerplate code to do things properly. Image loading was often a huge source of crashes due to out-of-memory errors and doing i…

Personally I think that Flutter is the future for cross-platform UI toolkits. As a React dev (in my spare time, I’m still a student), using RN was a pain due to the need to install native extensions for almost everything. The batteries-included approach of Flutter and just the polish around the dev workflow made it more attractive to a beginner mobile dev.

Post by m3kw9 » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 4:37 AM UTC

luxuryballs wrote: post #50

I built an iOS game using Sprite Kit and had to hack together support for multiple screen sizes later which was kind of a pain. Likewise they make you provide an app icon of like 25 different sizes. Have not done standard UI work yet but unless you use a “reactive” set of layouts I can only imagine the pain.

Post by ardit33 » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 4:46 AM UTC

vlozko wrote: post #59

aquabeagle wrote: post #58

I 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.

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 5:29 AM UTC

maxaf wrote: post #2

I should’ve known that it’s turtles all the way down. Considering how many years I’ve sunk into programming for other platforms, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I got suckered into believing that mobile computing platforms represented a significant enough paradigm shift to allow for starting with a cleaner slate. Not true! Having gotten into iOS development over the past couple of years, I’ve come to real…

Post by marklubi » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

Qasaur wrote: post #112

jmull wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter is DOA for anything but short-term projects. For one thing, it’s tied to a custom language. That means there’s significant overhead for developers which shows itself directly as a learning curve, or indirectly in terms of hiring or retention of developers. At least as significantly, they chose to implement custom controls (rather than wrap native controls). With that approach there’s really no way for them to…

I disagree strongly with this. I'm currently writing a cross-platform app in Flutter that is launching soon, and I found that the developer experience is world-class and I've had very few issues so far. The language is incredibly easy to pick up with close to zero overhead if you are a somewhat competent programmer as it is essentially a very lightweight OOP language. My main languages are otherwise Go and Rust, and…