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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?

#91

Post by llmblockchain »

muzani wrote: post #7

I've been developing Android since 2012. It was worse then. Still sucks now but isn't as bad. Esoteric errors are still the norm. With 10 years of experience you only have to swear a whole day when updating a library, instead of spending a week. GPT does poorly with beginners - it's definitely something humans have advantage with AI and I expect the gap to get bigger. I do not touch legacy projects anymore because th…

> You get weird bugs where A needs to be 1.71.0 but B needs A at 1.69.0 or 2+. Upgrading A to 2.0.1 will fix A and B but break CDEFG.

Sounds like "modern" web development.

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

#93

Post by iiJDSii »

muzani wrote: post #7

I've been developing Android since 2012. It was worse then. Still sucks now but isn't as bad. Esoteric errors are still the norm. With 10 years of experience you only have to swear a whole day when updating a library, instead of spending a week. GPT does poorly with beginners - it's definitely something humans have advantage with AI and I expect the gap to get bigger. I do not touch legacy projects anymore because th…

Funny enough I actually did Android development contract work circa 2012-2014. I never did anything more complex than working with internal phone components (bluetooth, accelerometer/gyroscope, GUI/text, etc) and SQLite, but even so I quickly decided I wanted nothing to do with that platform.

Coming back a decade later for a side project, I guess I have the same opinion.

Now with the help of GPT-like assistants, I'm sure I could slog through some fairly vanilla development tasks like I did in the past, but when it comes to building anything a bit 'outside the box', no thanks.

Thankfully there are hardware equivalent packages (mini linux development machines like raspberry pi) that fit the bill, but they aren't as ubiquitous or nicely packaged as a modern smartphone unfortunately.

One wonders if there's some opportunity there, take all this great generic smartphone hardware (a $100 phone now is crazy) and package it with a developer-first OS. It could just be a linux system with a dumb, button-focused frontend for users to mimic Android/iOS.

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

#94

Post by muzani »

jfengel wrote: post #74
muzani wrote: post #7

I've been developing Android since 2012. It was worse then. Still sucks now but isn't as bad. Esoteric errors are still the norm. With 10 years of experience you only have to swear a whole day when updating a library, instead of spending a week. GPT does poorly with beginners - it's definitely something humans have advantage with AI and I expect the gap to get bigger. I do not touch legacy projects anymore because th…

Oh, are GUIs not XML any more? Good. I am a programmer. Don't make me learn yet another language with no debugging tools. Just write the UI in the same language as the rest of my work. (I look in on Android every few years, but I haven't done any real work in it.)

Haven't used XML for them in over 2 years (excluding replacing legacy code and fixing typos). They went deep into XML+data binding which people liked for a while, because you could do UI tests without building the whole UI and such. But it wasn't so good in production because building everything from XML was making build times long. So while you could test that it's outputting the correct UI content within 2 minutes instead of 12, it also meant assert(1+1==2) took 2 minutes too.

I believe deprecating kapt now also breaks data binding, though I don't know if it breaks all the other basic XML layout stuff.

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

#95

Post by iiJDSii »

giantg2 wrote: post #23

"Using Python scripting and OpenCV, I had a working cross-compatible script in 10 minutes, for both Linux and Windows." What took you 10 minutes would take me a long time to learn. I rather enjoyed making some basic Android apps. I didn't work with much hardware stuff and heard that part is tough due to all the variations.

Appreciate the ego boost, but it was literally some modifications to python opencv demos available on their webpage. But that's what's amazing, it was up and running so fast and worked cross-platform after 5 minutes of debugging something with ChatGPT.

Yes it's become quite clear to me that using an Android phone is not a good development platform to work with external hardware devices. I understand this has never been it's intended purpose, but come on, we have a linux kernel sitting under the hood. Just feels like a waste of potential.

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

#96

Post by flutas »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #79
flutas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao, tbh all this is coming across as "Jr Engineer knows everything" syndrome. The fact your [1] link is a class that's not even used in the TextView class isn't lost on me to start. They share an interface though, scary!1!! The fact your [0] link is to a copy of the TextView from 2017 is even funnier. > 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 fact your [1] link is a class that's not even used in the TextView class The [1] link is only used by TextView. It is completely reliant on TextView and can't be used by other components. And yes, it is used, right here: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/... mEditor is used over 400 times in TextView.java. Did you even read it before commenting? >The fact your [0] link is to a copy of t…

> I wonder why this great piece of code was deprecated if it's so great? And yes, that's another great thing about the Andorid SDK. Everything is deprecated while its replacements are only supported on new devices.

Again, same vibes.

The reason you are seeing anything like this, is because you are looking at foundation code and expecting app code. This code is going to be used by apps to run on ALL devices. Best way I can try to describe it is just library code sits between the kernel and software, it has to support everything. Company X's latest XR/AI app doesn't.

Software is constantly evolving for whatever the latest trend is be it VR, AI, or whatever, and eventually you move on from devices that don't get updated. But, so do users. Users by and far want the latest and greatest, shiniest thing. That means every company wants to support `thing`, even if it means dropping `oldThing`.

Funnily enough I had to have a discussion at my job today about dropping support for FireOS 6 devices because of OS specific bugs that happen with Compose that cause a buggy UI. We can't make it work exactly as we want while providing a good experience, so we won't be providing an experience at all. The reason that's okay? Those devices have usage percentage that's practically nil, as they are older devices and not the "latest and greatest".

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

#97

Post by iiJDSii »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #92

If you think Android app development is crazy, try to work on Android itself. > Well, looks like modern mobile phones are not a great hacker's playground, huh? I'm using a GNU/Linux phone and I'm super happy with how playgroundish it can get if I want.

That would be my ideal device haha... have any particular devices of that nature you'd recommend? Lower end on cost would be preferred.

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

#98

Post by mikhael28 »

rstat1 wrote: post #65
muzani wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Centering a widget regardless of orientation (and detecting the orientation) is incredibly trivial with Flutter. You might have just been tired at the end of a long day and missed something.

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

#99

Post by nvy »

muzani wrote: post #7

I've been developing Android since 2012. It was worse then. Still sucks now but isn't as bad. Esoteric errors are still the norm. With 10 years of experience you only have to swear a whole day when updating a library, instead of spending a week. GPT does poorly with beginners - it's definitely something humans have advantage with AI and I expect the gap to get bigger. I do not touch legacy projects anymore because th…

For someone who has never written an Android app before but knows Java, what's the "happy path" to getting a native MVP out the door in 2024? Must I learn Kotlin? Is there a "blessed API" or design pattern these days that's better supported than the others?

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

#100

Post by seba_dos1 »

iiJDSii wrote: post #97
seba_dos1 wrote: post #92

If you think Android app development is crazy, try to work on Android itself. > Well, looks like modern mobile phones are not a great hacker's playground, huh? I'm using a GNU/Linux phone and I'm super happy with how playgroundish it can get if I want.

That would be my ideal device haha... have any particular devices of that nature you'd recommend? Lower end on cost would be preferred.

I've been using a Librem 5 as my daily driver for years now. I also have a PinePhone, but it's quite slow compared to L5.
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