Take it from someone who has worked on android dev tools - yes.
Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
31–40 of 157 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#32Try using Expo! I've found it to be much easier than native development on either platform, and its fairly easy to move through if you know web stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s like saying “may you live in interesting times.” Sounds fun at first, but it always ends in tears.
Where does that quote come from? I have been saying it for years but I have lost the source!
The phrase "may you live in interesting times" is the lowest in a trilogy of Chinese curses that continue "may you come to the attention of those in authority" and finish with "may the gods give you everything you ask for." I have no idea about its authenticity.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#34/? 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.…
When you get x on turmux working you see what mobile development could have been and weep for the fallen world we live in.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#35I remember asking some Android devs, "How do I install a compiler on Android?"
They proceeded to tell me what to download on my laptop. I repeated my question, emphasizing "ON Android". They gave me blank looks. I said, "I want to install a toolchain ON an Android device, and run it there. How do I do that?"
They had no idea.
I asked, "What if you want to compile something that requires compiling something, then using that something further down the line, like Perl?"
Again, no idea.
A platform without a native toolchain is a very awkward place to be. I stopped trying to wrap my head around it and stopped playing with Android.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#36[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#37Android is an example of technical debt from poor caked-in design. Its problems are still stemming from being rushed to market (relatively speaking) two decades ago. It's had enormous success as the most viable iOS alternative, but at a cost. On the flip side, consider PalmOS. It was SotA at its debut in 1996. In the early aughts, Palm made Treo smartphones when almost no one knew what a smartphone was. It had a mult…
Maemo was also too early I think. I guess the main problem was that the N800/N770 were not a smartphone, not mass-marketed and still too clunky for the general public (plus lack of unlimited mobile internet). Though the upgrade over PalmOS was impressive, went from barely able to load a modern web page to browing all the web smoothlessly while streaming online radios. (though this much shouldn't have been that impressive considering it's just basic multitasking and having enough RAM)
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of my stack overflow points are from helping people run their build in Eclipse :) Gradle is deprecated now though. And Jetpack Compose is about as convenient as Flutter.
Gradle replaced Maven which replaced ant which replaced make. The tech treadmill was one of the reasons I retired early and I'm glad I did. What is the new hotness replacing Gradle?
Kotlin DSL
https://developer.android.com/build/migrate-to-kotlin-dsl
This one makes sense, though the improvement is minor.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#39Getting 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 de…
It's not that awful once you get hang of it, but it's a mess made by google. Kotlin which is maintained Jetbrain is catching up. Google is far less interested in owning kotlin. Therefore creating a confusion with mix of grovy, maven, java and xml as hell.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s like saying “may you live in interesting times.” Sounds fun at first, but it always ends in tears.
Where does that quote come from? I have been saying it for years but I have lost the source!
I read it first in the "Interesting Times" by Terry Pratchett. I don't know did he invented this phrase or borrowed it somewhere.