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

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 6:48 AM UTC

amimetic wrote: post #80

mdocherty wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be hesitant to recommend seriously pursuing cross-platform. Most serious applications generally run into scaling issues as they get more complicated and demands require more than the abstractions the cross-platform tool can provide.

Today is a weird time to get into mobile app dev. The standard 'native' UI frameworks are pretty terrible in terms of how they cope with complexity and their ability to change over time with their dated OOP APIs. Though on both platforms the tooling has been climbing ever upwards towards local maxima. The best options available for most Apps today (even if just for a single platform) are typically React Native or Flu…

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 6:53 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…

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 7:00 AM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #91

allo37 wrote: post #69

On Android, that there hasn't been much love for C/C++ and the NDK is full of interesting pitfalls: Oh your camera gives you NV21 frames, but the hardware VP8 encoder only accepts I420? Makes perfect sense. Oh, we don't actually let you query what format the encoder expects until a later API than you're using. Just try them in a loop until one doesn't fail, makes perfect sense. The camera was a party too, added a lis…

The Android camera issues you reference reached all the way up to the higher level Java APIs, at least back when I was doing Android development from 2012 until about a year ago. Dunno if it has gotten any better since then. All of the MediaCodec APIs were quite powerful, but did nothing to "keep the easy things easy" or hide much of the lower level hardware details from your app. This is kind of a theme in Android (…

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

graydsl wrote: post #142

billfruit wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps Xamarin is a good choice as well for who want to transition from development of desktop apps. Also support for F# on Xamarin is also a plus.

I was waiting for someone to mention Xamarin. :D I haven't worked with the platform for 2 to 3 years. In my old job we had massive problems at the end hence we switched to native (we were an agency). Problems we had: * Deploying to devices was painfully slow compared to native stack. * We all had Macs and the tooling (Visual Studio for Mac/MonoDevelop) was pretty bad compared to Android Studio. * Wrapping 3rd party n…

Post by allo37 » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 12:12 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #91

allo37 wrote: post #69

On Android, that there hasn't been much love for C/C++ and the NDK is full of interesting pitfalls: Oh your camera gives you NV21 frames, but the hardware VP8 encoder only accepts I420? Makes perfect sense. Oh, we don't actually let you query what format the encoder expects until a later API than you're using. Just try them in a loop until one doesn't fail, makes perfect sense. The camera was a party too, added a lis…

The Android camera issues you reference reached all the way up to the higher level Java APIs, at least back when I was doing Android development from 2012 until about a year ago. Dunno if it has gotten any better since then. All of the MediaCodec APIs were quite powerful, but did nothing to "keep the easy things easy" or hide much of the lower level hardware details from your app. This is kind of a theme in Android (…