Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful? • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by jinushaun » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:08 AM UTC

iiJDSii wrote: post #93

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…

I hit the same thing over a decade ago. Stick with Android and make a lot of money but hate life, or switch to something else and be happier.

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

#112

Post by ivm » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:09 AM UTC

crossroadsguy wrote: post #45

It is pathetic. I have been an Android developer for more than a decade and some aspects of it have become shittier. One of the other, seems tangential problems, in Android development world is architecture fatigue. Every other week the cool kids will change to something else and everything else becomes "so old school". For what? No one knows. It's just because the upstream (i.e. famous) cool kids are doing that. One…

Coming from iOS development, it was incredibly frustrating not to have an event for software keyboard appearance/disappearance. I tried researching the issue and ended up in Google Groups, where an official Google representative was smugly telling the developers that they did not need such a feature to make Android apps.

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

#113

Post by ivm » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:13 AM UTC

John23832 wrote: post #13

You should try iOS dev.

It's much, much better. I'm doing both and it always takes at least 2x time to do the same thing on Android. Apple's API are much more consistent and the overall architecture of UIKit is just great (thank to its AppKit ancestor).

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

#114

Post by ivm » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:19 AM UTC

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…

macOS has decades-long technical debt as well (NSCell can still be found in the UIs you see), yet it remains incredibly robust aside from the years when Apple shake it with big visual updates.

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

#115

Post by muzani » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:14 AM UTC

nvy wrote: post #99

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?

You don't have to learn Kotlin. It cut down LOC by about 40% by the time I picked it up, but today's Java has become more efficient and supports things like @nullable. Kotlin is nice though, and it leads into more advanced things like Jetpack Compose for UI and Kotlin Flow which is a nice way to do reactive programming.

Reactive programming is useful for front end because the UI will update as soon as the data downloads, so it scales linearly with complexity and API calls, instead of an exponential mess of if-else.

You can use the github repo I linked. I designed it to be complex enough to handle the harder tasks but simple enough for a beginner to reverse engineer. Just download, run to see it work, and hack it into what you need.

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

#116

Post by JourneyJourney » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:28 AM UTC

Piggy backing this topic. I started android developmentin 2011, did about 7 years of it. I took a contract job in a different technology.

I want to jump back to Android dev contracting, my two questions for the up-to-date Android devs: - Do you have any resource to catch up with what I missed in the past 4-5 years of Android development? - How is the Android job market these days, compared to the iOS one?

-

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

#117

Post by rcarmo » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:41 AM UTC

“even with AI assistants and Google guiding me” seems like part of the problem, because you’re missing the higher-level knowledge that Android, like all mobile operating systems, is a sandboxed environment where the supported runtimes evolved to facilitate low level hardware access and provide an “easy” GUI and touch development model, not a low-level one.

So you either reimpmentent the whole thing in a native way (using Java/Kotlin or C++ for lower level integration) or you’re SOL. You can embed Python libraries, but you’re better off learning to use wherever native analogues and frameworks the platform already support.

I personally stay the heck away from Android Studio (I got a very early start in Android development, so most of my projects are just Gradle/pom.xml or a Makefile atop a “normal” Java tree).

That said, you have _a lot more flexibilty_ in incorporating multiple languages and non-native frameworks than, say, in iOS.

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

#118

Post by rcarmo » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:45 AM UTC

lmz wrote: post #41

muzani wrote: post #38

Earlier 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.

Yep. And I still use Makefiles to this day.

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

#119

Post by nvy » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 7:20 AM UTC

muzani wrote: post #115

nvy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You don't have to learn Kotlin. It cut down LOC by about 40% by the time I picked it up, but today's Java has become more efficient and supports things like @nullable. Kotlin is nice though, and it leads into more advanced things like Jetpack Compose for UI and Kotlin Flow which is a nice way to do reactive programming. Reactive programming is useful for front end because the UI will update as soon as the data downlo…

Thanks!

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

#120

Post by crossroadsguy » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 7:40 AM UTC

ivm wrote: post #112

crossroadsguy wrote: post #45

It is pathetic. I have been an Android developer for more than a decade and some aspects of it have become shittier. One of the other, seems tangential problems, in Android development world is architecture fatigue. Every other week the cool kids will change to something else and everything else becomes "so old school". For what? No one knows. It's just because the upstream (i.e. famous) cool kids are doing that. One…

Coming from iOS development, it was incredibly frustrating not to have an event for software keyboard appearance/disappearance. I tried researching the issue and ended up in Google Groups, where an official Google representative was smugly telling the developers that they did not need such a feature to make Android apps.

Ah, those Google Groups where you are made to feel like an idiot for just reporting an issue and then few centuries later someone with some @google.com email comes and says something completely unrelated and closes it.