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

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

#101

Post by pjmlp »

kuschku wrote: post #96
pjmlp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, I wouldn't say Android is poorly designed, it's just mediocre, I would expect more from Google. I completely agree and although I only do it as a hobby, there are lots of points that many in the community feel as pain. - They never managed to write a proper working emulator, while other companies had no problem doing so; - The whole debacle of C++ support, had JetBrains not decided to create CLion, to this…

Regarding ndk build, you forgot the tooling Google themselves uses for everything: Bazel That can also build NDK and Android.

You are right, and also reminded me that if you check the AOSP commits, they are in the process of adding a new one built with Go.

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

#102

Post by rcarmo »

georgeecollins wrote: post #24

Gradle has problems, but it doesn't seem worse to me than making builds in Eclipse was. I would love to hear why people think it is better or worse. I agree multidex is terrible. Google please fix this. I do not know when I should use a fragment instead of a view. I know the layout reasons google gives in their developer guide but I don't think I have seen a piece of code that really uses fragments that way. So why?…

I tried to use gradle when I moved one of our apps to Android Studio for a few tweaks and updates - ended up using Ant and Visual Studio Code instead, such was the slowness and pain of the whole thing.

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

#103

Post by babuskov »

pjmlp wrote: post #88
RivieraKid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After all these years, I still find the most difficult and un-natural thing is mixing concurrency / background tasks that must outlive the UI with complex UI component lifecycles. Completely agree. I've been developing for Android since 1.0 and the complex interaction between background tasks and activity lifecycle is the worst part of Android that a significant majority of devs get wrong, introducing subtle bugs.…

> Overall, I wouldn't say Android is poorly designed, it's just mediocre, I would expect more from Google. I completely agree and although I only do it as a hobby, there are lots of points that many in the community feel as pain. - They never managed to write a proper working emulator, while other companies had no problem doing so; - The whole debacle of C++ support, had JetBrains not decided to create CLion, to this…

> Choosing to AOT on device

That's the reason I'm not using my Nexus 10 tablet anymore. So, it doesn't only hurt the developers, but users as well.

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

#104

Post by TheCoreh »

tluyben2 wrote: post #66
tananaev wrote: post #42

I think there are no developers that are true experts in both Android and iOS platforms. Every developer I know either leans towards one platform or another. There are also developers who know both platforms pretty well, but I won't call them experts in either. I consider myself an expert in Android development. The only point that I agree with is multidex, but there are historical reasons for the limitation and I th…

I am an expert in iOS dev but I use and want to like Android. It is quite annoying... I really do not like the walled garden of Apple and on Android devices, even cheap MTK ones I am quite handy at installing what I want, but for some reason I find Android development a real pain compared to iOS where I find most older things (stuff, as it goes in life, needs to mature) very obvious and easy. I would say what most an…

The GPL incompatibility issue has nothing to do with Apple not allowing emulators. (After all there are BSD/MIT emulators) They don't want (non-sandboxed) interpreters running unreviewed code. Right now the only interpreter allowed to be used with downloaded code is webkit's JS JIT.

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

#105

Post by AstralStorm »

pjmlp wrote: post #101
kuschku wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding ndk build, you forgot the tooling Google themselves uses for everything: Bazel That can also build NDK and Android.

You are right, and also reminded me that if you check the AOSP commits, they are in the process of adding a new one built with Go.

And then the toolchain dies completely after splintering and exploding?

Time to bypass Google and just use plain old cmake instead. So far, it is still possible to just run java+dex or jack straight from command line...

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

#106

Post by cuu508 »

pjmlp wrote: post #90
MaulingMonkey wrote: post #40

> Google’s adoption of gradle has been a disaster and proved to be a terrible decision. It did help out with some previous issues, namely multiple app targets, but it’s slowed down compilation severely. It also makes for masochistic configuration files with major redundancy and fragmented dependency hosts. Getting an app to compile shouldn’t be a challenge. The only thing worse than gradle is ANT, which it replaced.…

> The only thing worse than gradle is ANT, which it replaced. Ant is wonderful. It runs FAST and executes builds properly. Gradle makes my fans go full throttle, takes minutes to complete builds unless I make use of a background daemon with 2GB allocated to it. If it wasn't for Android, I would never use Gradle! Even Maven feels like a pleasure (yes I do enjoy XML).

I'm sure there's room for optimization in Gradle build process, but if build times and fan noise annoys you, a few tips:

- in my experience, it looks like gradle builds can make 100% use of all cores my CPU has. If you are working on Android projects day in and day out, it may be worth getting a CPU with more and faster cores, it will increase your productivity and pay for itself in a short time

- you can build a powerful, but virtually silent PC: big aftermarket CPU cooler, semi-passive GPU, semi-passive PSU, SSDs, no case fans.

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

#107

Post by pjmlp »

cuu508 wrote: post #106
pjmlp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing worse than gradle is ANT, which it replaced. Ant is wonderful. It runs FAST and executes builds properly. Gradle makes my fans go full throttle, takes minutes to complete builds unless I make use of a background daemon with 2GB allocated to it. If it wasn't for Android, I would never use Gradle! Even Maven feels like a pleasure (yes I do enjoy XML).

I'm sure there's room for optimization in Gradle build process, but if build times and fan noise annoys you, a few tips: - in my experience, it looks like gradle builds can make 100% use of all cores my CPU has. If you are working on Android projects day in and day out, it may be worth getting a CPU with more and faster cores, it will increase your productivity and pay for itself in a short time - you can build a pow…

I am not going to buy a new computer just to make Gradle happy, when everything else works perfectly fine, including MSBuild, Ant and Maven builds.

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

#108

Post by cel1ne »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #18

A while back, Dianne Hackborn famously said: "We often see questions from developers that are asking from the Android platform engineers about the kinds of design patterns and architectures they use in their apps. But the answer, maybe surprisingly, is we often don't have a strong opinion or really an opinion at all." (1) While that may have been a lofty ideal, in practice Android has many strict requirements on how…

I agree, that's why I don't use fragments at all and do all my multithreading in the way of communicating sequential processes: via BlockingQueue communication to hand-written background threads / services.

The trick with Android-development really is to acknowledge that large parts of the SDK are just crap and that you are better served writing custom code than trying to use it.

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

#109

Post by distances »

fractalwrench wrote: post #86
georgeecollins wrote: post #24

Gradle has problems, but it doesn't seem worse to me than making builds in Eclipse was. I would love to hear why people think it is better or worse. I agree multidex is terrible. Google please fix this. I do not know when I should use a fragment instead of a view. I know the layout reasons google gives in their developer guide but I don't think I have seen a piece of code that really uses fragments that way. So why?…

Gradle is just incredibly slow on Android compared to Eclipse. particularly with larger projects. Instant Run has helped alleviate this to some extent, but it's still not uncommon for a build to take 2+ minutes. I guess this is mostly due to all the resource crunching that Android does, and the fact that Android Studio doesn't perform incremental compilation by default. Another annoyance is that every time a minor ch…

We are building a bit larger and more complex Android project, and every now and then just the Gradle part takes over 5 minutes for me. Just the Gradle syncing, before actually compiling anything.

I think it's Gradle getting somehow into knots and taking a while to resolve everything -- I've got a very beefy computer so it's not about processing power. Gradle is just ridiculous.

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

#110

Post by cel1ne »

gjolund wrote: post #19
clumsysmurf wrote: post #18

A while back, Dianne Hackborn famously said: "We often see questions from developers that are asking from the Android platform engineers about the kinds of design patterns and architectures they use in their apps. But the answer, maybe surprisingly, is we often don't have a strong opinion or really an opinion at all." (1) While that may have been a lofty ideal, in practice Android has many strict requirements on how…

This is an excellent comment, and it mirrors my experience with android also. Most of the responses Ive gotten from coworkers is "what would you change". I have a hard time answering that.

If one were allowed to break backward compatibility I could come up with a list of changes easily.
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