Android development is pretty bad
but I never had trouble loading in C/C++ libraries with the NDK beyond the debugging issues
Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
51–60 of 157 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#52Android 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…
As primarily an end user of Android, it is fine. I like the more open nature of it.
But it is very clear that the guard rails were down especially for the first few years in trying to acquire functionality and market share by any means possible. Now Google is in space of trying to lock down the system while not breaking things.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#53> Using Python scripting and OpenCV, I had a working cross-compatible script in 10 minutes, for both Linux and Windows.
Which toolkit did you use?
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#54I 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 usin…
To me it just sounds like you want Termux. It works pretty well for things like gcc, Python, or Perl.
For fun, I managed to get a full X environment running, including Intellij! The amazing thing was that it actually ran fairly decently on a Pixel 5, though it did tend to run out of memory with anything more than trivial projects.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kotlin DSL https://developer.android.com/build/migrate-to-kotlin-dsl This one makes sense, though the improvement is minor.
That's still Gradle. Just a different language to configure it.
Eh, thanks for the correction. I originally read it as Groovy. Unfortunately, I can't edit or delete my original comment, but feel free to downvote it.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#56Earlier 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?
Gradle replacing maven seems like a stretch. Maybe on Android. But everywhere else Maven is still going strong.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#57Yes, the Android SDK has to be one of the worst software packages to ever have been written. Just look at the sourcecode for TextView[0] if you want to see for yourself. 8,700 lines of code to show text on the screen? Well actually, TextView is actually a full blown text editor with the editing functionality turned off as a flag. EditText just wraps TextView and sets the `ediable` field to true. What genius software design! Ever wonder how those selection handles appear when you long press on text in a TextView? I wonder what component that is? Trick question – its built right in to TextView as well! It uses a popup window the displays the handles in global coordinates which it gets using a mixture of `getLocationInWindow` and `getLocationOnScreen`.[1] Another stroke of genius form the Android SDK! Want to change any of this functionality slightly? Now you have to make your own TextView starting from StaticLayout.
[0] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
[1] https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/...
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#58I 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 usin…
Sounds like an X Y problem. What you want is to cross compile using the NDK toolchain. That should get you 95% of the way there (barring tweaking with downstream project flags to work with bionic libc and limited Android user land and other Android idiosyncrasies)
What I really want (or wanted, I should say) is a native toolchain that runs on the Android device, not a cross toolchain that runs elsewhere. NDK isn't that.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#59> I have devices with USB OTG, and a USB-C hub for the webcam.
Using an external webcam with an Android device seems a fairly exotic scenario doesn't it? Whatever, I would intuitively expect (disclaimer: almost no experience in mobile development) the Android OS to detect a USB-attached camera as another built-in camera and expose it via common APIs rather than let you access it via some sort of low-level libs reading the USB.
Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
#60I 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 usin…
To me it just sounds like you want Termux. It works pretty well for things like gcc, Python, or Perl. For fun, I managed to get a full X environment running, including Intellij! The amazing thing was that it actually ran fairly decently on a Pixel 5, though it did tend to run out of memory with anything more than trivial projects.
This looks like exactly what I wanted to find! Thank you.
I had been soured by the Android platform because I bought a brand new device, mostly because it had a physical keyboard, only to find out that it wouldn't get any new updates, nor could I use Skype on it, nor could I tether with it. Android was supposed to be the "open" platform, but at the time (which, admittedly, was something like ten or so years ago), it wasn't.
If I can use Termux to get a modern OpenSSH on to my device, it may get used yet! Thank you :)