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Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#11

Post by ffhhj »

Android Studio isn't that bad, but their design system is horrible. After years dealing with that crap I ended creating my own WebView wrapper and moved all the design and logic to HTML5, which I write by hand, never been a fan of frameworks. Even created a WASM obfuscator with Python, and my apps autoupdate without relying on Google Play, by dowloading a compressed package. Whenever these are taken down I just set a flag/link in the DB and the app will instruct the user to get the re-published app.

Sadly the golden age of the app store is long gone. I used to make thousands monthly around 2015 with silly apps, but all went down the drain by 2018. Making apps isn't worth anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#15

Post by yen223 »

leros wrote: post #2

I think you're just going through the learning curve of something new. You could make the same argument about a React/Next app being unnecessarily complicated with Hello World.

I loathe to say this, because I still have a soft spot for the language, but you could say the same thing about Python development in 2024

Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#16

Post by westurner »

/? termux USB webcam: https://www.google.com/search?q=termux+usb+webcam

Termux was F-droid only, but 4 years later is back on the Play Store: https://github.com/termux-play-store#current-status-for-user...

Termux has both glibc and musl libc. Android has bionic libc.

One time I got JupyterLab to run on Android in termux with `proot` and pip. And then the mobile UI needed work in a WebView app or just a browser tab t. Maybe things would port back from Colab to JupyterLab.

conda-forge and Linux arm64 packages don't work on arm64 Android devices, so the only option is to install the *-dev dependencies and wait for compilation to finish on the Android device.

Waydroid is one way to work with Android APKs in a guest container on a Linux host.

That Android Studio doesn't work on Android or ChromiumOS without containers (that students can't have either).

Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#20

Post by kevmo314 »

Getting native libraries to work well on Android is a beast. I happened to have done exactly what you're describing though, specifically rendering libusb through an Android phone. My code is at https://github.com/kevmo314/kineticstreamer and you might be particularly interested in the CMake build at https://github.com/kevmo314/kineticstreamer/blob/main/app/sr...

Happy to answer any questions or help you out if you decide to keep going down this road, shoot me an email at kevmo314@gmail.com. Ultimately an Android phone is still just a Linux computer but jumping through the hoops is definitely hard.

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