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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?

#121

Post by llm_trw »

westurner wrote: post #88
llm_trw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get x on turmux working you see what mobile development could have been and weep for the fallen world we live in.

containers/podman > [Feature]: Android support: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/17717 : > There are docker and containerd in termux-packages. https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/root-p... But Android 13+ supports rootless pKVM VMs, which podman-machine should be able to run containers in; (but only APK-installed binaries are blessed with the necessary extended filesystem attributes…

Wait so you're telling me I can run podman on android?

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

#122

Post by rasz »

iiJDSii wrote: post #89
kevmo314 wrote: post #20

Getting 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…

Hey thanks for this! I gave it a try, imported and built in my Android Studio ("Koala" if that matters), tried getting it installed on a phone, and unfortunately got this cryptic error: > ninja: error: 'lib/libjpeg.so', needed by 'C:/Users/ADMIN/AndroidStudioProjects/kineticstreamer/app/build/intermediates/cxx/Debug/3xf5p505/obj/arm64-v8a/libkinetic.so', missing and no known rule to make it That being said, I browsed…

>got this cryptic error:

> 'lib/libjpeg.so' missing

whats cryptic about that?

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

#123

Post by 3np »

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?

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/learner-english/...

> to be covered with a thick, dry layer of something

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

#124

Post by pas »

ivm wrote: post #114
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.

It's incredibly robust compared to Windows

https://recorder.easeus.com/screen-recording-resource/macos-...

https://lifehacker.com/tech/mac-os-sonoma-update-fixes-scree... ... okay I don't even know what's this :D

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

#125

Post by pas »

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…

Ridiculously low-quality documentation, a build and development system that puts the local Rube Goldberg competition winner to shame, constant churn, total deafness or willful ignoring of wishes of dev ... and so on have nothing to do with what happened 20 years ago.

It's the classic "I would like to serve 5 terabytes"[0] Google problem.

(Their engineering culture reeks of this. See the tools they have released. Angular, Bazel, Go, Kubernetes, etc. The last one escaped the usual decline of incompetence because the community showed up.

Go has GOPATH. Even in a language designed for "simplicity" initially getting it set up had this roadblock.)

And no doubt the roots of the problem are manifold, but it seems all stemming from ongoing management incompetence (creation of shareholder value[1] maaaybe excluded, though I am very curious what kind of inane metrics the Android SDK team is whipped to chase).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI&t=0s

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

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

#126

Post by giantg2 »

iiJDSii wrote: post #95
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 be…

Why use external hardware when they have cameras built in? I'm sure you could find an example or open source app that uses the camera and just modify that, like you did with the openCV.

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

#127

Post by synergy20 »

mijkal wrote: post #78

I've found React Native, especially in recent times, to provide a very good mobile dev environment. I wrote an app and had it running in both iOS and Android in no time (with minimal iOS dev and zero Android xp prior to that). My app included the Jitsi video extension (with very customized Jitsi controls and self-hosted backend), so not just a simple CRUD app. (To be fair, my background is mostly Node and React, but…

or capacitorjs

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

#128

Post by vdfs »

llmblockchain wrote: post #91
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.

It would be interesting to see where this doesn't happen, you can't just update stuff without considering breaking changes and new bugs in new updates

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

#129

Post by kkfx »

Android is a commercial modern platform, where developing MUST BE HARD to discourage most and makes the few who can rule the others, meaning the big ones. Windows is similar but being much older and born without the iron under control underneath it's much less, *nix systems tend to be open.

You are not crazy and the pain you feel is the pain of commercial IT. Not strictly need to commerce of course, but that's the modern common practice. The cure is FLOSS, mandatory, from the start.

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

#130

Post by flutas »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #105
flutas wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Again, same vibes. Are you serious? The Android devs have been working to fix the deprecation and update issue for the last decade and a half. I think you are actually the junior dev here if you are defending it. They have been slowly moving from their custom fork of Linux back to mainline, separating device-level components (eg. Bluetooth) as separate modules, trying to force device vendors to support a baseline of…

> The fact that pointing that out as a flaw gives you "junior programmer vibes" is seriously concerning.

It's the fact that you hand wave away Text rendering as "just showing text" while claiming you've made your own.

Then claim that platform code is terrible because it...uses flags to determine what platform it's on and use the appropriate commands...

THAT is what gives me JR eng vibes.

> Also, you failed to address even a single point I made in my post about TextView.

And there's the lack of reading comprehension with a Jr.

"You didn't say anything about X component."

Yeah, when talking about components A-Z and the structure around them you don't typically need to point out that X will be included, but here we are.

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