It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

i have to say, refusing/unable/lazy/ to learn is the most terrible thing ever happened to a developer. I'm always excited about new things even I have to learn them hard, even they start with poor quality, but I believe these are what make developers happy

I feel you are concentrating on a very small and negative part of the post in a very disingenuous manner.

I read the article more as: "I have found throughout the years I've become a decent programmer in iOS and Android, I'd rather be a good or excellent iOS developer."

The end just briefly describes why he decided to go with iOS instead of Android briefly, but that's about it.

I don't think that the person is being lazy. I've tried my hand at Android. I will continue to do so. I don't like it for the reasons enumerated in the post. The whole damn thing is a hack at this point. No one has a good generalizable architectural model for laying out an Android project. Attempting to target multiple devices is truly a pain. You can do it. You have to really, really think about. You also have to end up making whole sub sections of your product for a specific form factor.

I'm not saying that iOS is better. Don't really know. I've played with Swift and a few of the Apple tutorials.

In general, I'm against the current incarnation of mobile. After years of having an Android (and now having an iPhone due to work), I switched to a Samsung Juke. That's right, a feature phone! The Android just got slower and slower. No updates, not improvements. Finally it screeched in my ears while working. I picked it up and slammed it on the desk (felt great for a week). Both iOS and Android are slow, overly wrought operating systems.

That being said, unlike the author, I'll still use Android and iOS for my products. I have products that need to be mobile. They have to target the machines my customers have now. That also means that I'll have two native app code bases. I'll have to keep track of native app UX/UI standards. I'll have to keep such hardware around ('cause Android's emulator is still sucks when I've got an VM running).

Without mentioning which platform(s) I prefer, I have to agree with the author. On one hand, it's nice to be able to work cross-platform, and architecting your app such that you maximize code sharing is a worthy and satisfying goal. But quite a bit of code (the UI mainly) cannot be shared and it's kind of tiring to finish your Platform A app, look at it with pride, and then face the need to essentially re-write the exact same thing for Platforms B and C, only in different languages and frameworks "because platform competition". You're splitting your attention, expertise, time, and learning N-ways.

Eh, I think it is a natural process though in one's professional life. Especially with something like phones where the complexity has just exploded within each platform. The number of ways to deploy code on iOS alone (ObjC, Swift, Cordova, React native, etc.) has increased rapidly, and the size of the system apis alone has increased massively. Some form of specialization is likely inevitable. There was a time when the web only had webmasters, and they did everything from devops to backend to frontend. Gradually it became handy for a lot of people to focus their professional career on one area they were particularly good at, especially to move to the absolute peak of their potential.

By all means people should try out things, and keep up with things, but for a lot of professional reasons it makes sense to have a core competency. Of course it also makes sense to move that as needed.