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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?

#61

Post by eqvinox »

danpalmer wrote: post #24

There's a bigger issue here: OP describes writing prototype software on a desktop, and compares this to writing more production-style software on a highly constrained mobile device. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Python packaging is notoriously bad, and while you can get a Linux/Windows compatible script without too much work, getting to a single executable that just runs is much harder. Cloning a repo, s…

I'd argue they were trying to do prototype software for Android as well, and that's not a thing you can do. Which is the problem...

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

#63

Post by deadmutex »

worstspotgain wrote: post #5

Android 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…

What does caked-in mean?

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

#64

Post by cylinder714 »

johnklos wrote: post #35

I 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…

"Toybox's main goal is to make Android self-hosting by improving Android's command line utilities so it can build an installable Android Open Source Project image entirely from source under a stock Android system. After a talk at the 2013 Embedded Linux Conference explaining this plan, Google merged toybox into AOSP and began shipping toybox in Android Marshmallow in 2015." --Rob Landley

http://landley.net/toybox/

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

#65

Post by rstat1 »

muzani wrote: post #9
worstspotgain wrote: post #5

Android 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…

Dart and Flutter were actually meant to be the better design. Lots of features from those were replicated on Kotlin-Jetpack, especially Compose. And lots of those features end up being copied to Java. Dart-Flutter still supports them better natively though, instead of having to hack things like reactive programming via Kotlin Flow.

Flutter is at best no different IMO, as now not only do you have to deal with Flutter's build system for Dart, you also have to deal with Kotlin/the default Android build system when you want to do something not supported by the Flutter std libs, which last I tried was quite a lot. That was a few years back though so maybe its changed (though I doubt it). Jetpack Compose is similar in its "not much better"-ness to me.

I can't remember if it was Compose or Flutter, where I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get something to stay centered on the screen regardless of orientation. Something that I could do pretty easily and quickly with my own UI tech library in C++. However I can't use that code without having to jump through all the annoying hoops you have to jump through with JNI crap in order to use it. So I just don't bother with Android anymore.

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

#66

Post by danpalmer »

brrrrrm wrote: post #43
danpalmer wrote: post #24

There's a bigger issue here: OP describes writing prototype software on a desktop, and compares this to writing more production-style software on a highly constrained mobile device. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Python packaging is notoriously bad, and while you can get a Linux/Windows compatible script without too much work, getting to a single executable that just runs is much harder. Cloning a repo, s…

amazingly, the browser has pretty much solved all of this. fully compatible EMCAscript implementations on every single device with hardware access (such as the camera, as is needed in this post) I don't buy your "security through difficulty" argument for that reason alone.

I don't really mean "security through difficulty", I mean that on phones we have sandboxing, permissions, and a bunch of other factors that make phones much more secure than the average desktop/laptop. Browsers do provide a pretty good option here, but that comes at the cost of the browsers themselves being highly complex, and privileged software on the devices.

OP writing this prototype as a web app would likely have been the path of least resistance to having something work on mobile.

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

#67

Post by cylinder714 »

"PilBox (`PicoLisp Box') is a generic Android App which allows to write Apps in pure PicoLisp, without touching Java, and without the need of an Android SDK.

"You do not need to root your device. And - if you prefer - you do not need a separate development machine (PC or laptop): All can be done in a terminal on the device, and even in a Lisp REPL while the App is running."

https://picolisp.com/wiki/?pilbox

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

#68

Post by js2 »

deadmutex wrote: post #63
worstspotgain wrote: post #5

Android 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…

What does caked-in mean?

It's a typo. OP meant baked-in.

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

#70

Post by sgammon »

brutus1213 wrote: post #47
sgammon wrote: post #19

Kotlin is a dream. I literally love writing it.

Back when I was in undergrad, I recall how I was taught C. Just read one of the bible books on a weekend, and was ready to go. I was recently taking a look at Kotlin books and literally banged my head on the table. I realized the language has a good rap but it is ridiculously feature-laden .. to the point they threw in the kitchen sink. A key positive of languages is easiness to learn. I really wonder about Kotlin. I…

What do you mean "so big?" Kotlin doesn't feel "big" to me.

`

enum class Sample { A, B }

val x: Sample = Sample.A

val y = when (x) {

  Sample.A → 0

  Sample.B → 1
}

`

I think if you give it time you might like it. It takes some getting used to, sure, but especially compared with the alternatives (Java to use JVM, Java on Android, etc) it's pretty great.

Cross-platform Kotlin is very new but it works surprisingly well.

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