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Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber

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Re: Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber

#101

Post by TeMPOraL »

UncleMeat wrote: post #95
TeMPOraL wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of ridiculous, Android and banking, just yesterday I was browsing my transactions and wanted to send a screenshot of one to my wife. As it turns out, you cannot make screenshots of banking apps. Because "security".

Screenshots are saved to the sd card, where every app has complete access. Apps can specify certain UI safety features, like preventing clicks through overlaid UI elements or preventing screenshots. Blame the app if you want. There isn't some blanket policy in the OS that identifies banking apps and prevents screenshots.

If you make something like this possible, apps will use it. My problem is both with the app using this malfeature, and with the system providing it with no way for me (phone's owner and user) to override it.

Re: Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber

#102

Post by WorldMaker »

fencepost wrote: post #63

Didn't they do some of this kind of storage crap back on 4.x? And for that matter, isn't this pretty much exactly what Microsoft was doing with Windows Phone? My annoying use case for those was ebook readers - I have a pretty massive library of epubs (Thanks Baen Webscriptions!) and have tended to just dump a ton of them into a folder in storage on a device. I can then pull those up in CoolReader, Moon+ Reader (posit…

> On Windows Phone every reader app (not that there were many) had to have its own independent download because god forbid you have shared freaking storage.

That's not entirely accurate, even for Windows Phone at its most restrictive (7.x). The reader app would ask for storage apps and the storage apps would provide the files. It was quite common that the storage apps seemed like they would download multiple copies each file separately for each reader app, but that wasn't always the case. Unsurprisingly, some storage apps were just dumber than others.

Windows Phone 8.x and 10 opened up more direct file system access without going through an intermediary storage app, though of course possibly too late for the impression of stupid storage apps to linger.

ETA: Not that any of this currently matters given the current state of Windows on mobile devices. :(

Re: Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber

#103

Post by pcwalton »

WorldMaker wrote: post #99
pcwalton wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I don't like though, is their abysmal NDK support (notably compared to iOS) Yeah, this is my biggest gripe. The vast majority of popular apps in the Play Store are games, which all use the NDK. Yet Google refuses to give the NDK more resources.

Isn't that Google's intent that the NDK be hard to use? They still act like they may pull the rug at any time and switch kernels or hardware architectures on a whim, so it always seems like Google acts as though any NDK usage is a "bug" to them.

There's aspiration, and there's reality. The reality is that virtually all games, which are most of the Play Store, depend on native code. Without those games, Android would be much less attractive of a platform. Even if Google wanted to break them, they realistically can't.

Re: Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber

#104

Post by WorldMaker »

pcwalton wrote: post #103
WorldMaker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that Google's intent that the NDK be hard to use? They still act like they may pull the rug at any time and switch kernels or hardware architectures on a whim, so it always seems like Google acts as though any NDK usage is a "bug" to them.

There's aspiration, and there's reality. The reality is that virtually all games, which are most of the Play Store, depend on native code. Without those games, Android would be much less attractive of a platform. Even if Google wanted to break them, they realistically can't.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone accuse Google of being realistic. They certainly don't have a problem breaking NDK compatibility at whim, hence some the conversation above and in other threads. It doesn't feel from the outside that Google cares that much about how attractive Android is as a platform to games (or much else, for that matter), where it gets in the way of whatever the aspirations du jour are. (Is this one of the months of the arcane cycle as foretold by the elders that Chrome OS is still dominant over the other signs or is it that the Fuchsia kernel that waxes in the west again?)

Re: Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber

#106

Post by fattire »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #68
clumsysmurf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SAF APIs are cumbersome garbage up there with Account Manager and ContentProviders. Its missing important providers like DropBox, and even Google Drive doesn't implement it completely.

If a provider is missing it's because the developer of that app didn't create one.

Exactly. DropBox for example used to support the SAF and then for some reason pulled it, whereas Box.com's app supports it...

Re: Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber

#107

Post by qwerty456127 »

There are just so many apps demanding access to your clipboard, WiFi configuration and other stuff for no valid reason I'm actually glad to see Google is doing something. The only part that seems annoying is messing with what and how can apps access on the external storage. The μSD card and the OTG-attached thumb drive are exactly the places where I store content like audio, video, ebook, documents and other files, I use them the same way I use my laptop hard drive, having to grant root rights to an app every time I want to perform an operation on these files feels annoying and weird.

Re: Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber

#108

Post by qwerty456127 »

jbk wrote: post #24

After porting VLC on so many platforms, to be honest, working on Android applications is not too bad. Notably compared to other mobile platforms. The tools and IDE are quite good (they need a lot of RAM though), the deployment is easy, the development workflow simple enough and the devices are easy (and cheap) to come by. Even the Play Store console is not catastrophic. A contrario from Youtube, you can get questions…

You're the guy behind VLC for Android? Amazing job, it really is an essential app I couldn't live without! The only problem is years pass and I still can't find how to turn a directory into a playlist without hand-checking every single file in it (for me this usually means hundreds).

Re: Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber

#109

Post by fattire »

jbk wrote: post #21
fattire wrote: post #16

Android's Storage Access Framework is really underrated. Just ask the user to choose a document (file or image or whatever) by firing an intent-- then Android's built-in file picker starts up and you don't have to deal with implementing any of that UI experience. After the user picks the file, a content:// URI is returned back. https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/documen... Best part-- along with the…

> But in most situations involving External Storage, the SAF is really what you want to use anyway. Or not. A File Picker does not work for playlists, linked MKV/MOV files, subtitles autodetection (subfolders and such), and so many other multimedia cases. Also, it is a pain to use from the NDK... And incorrectly documented. And then, the UI to allow people to give you access to the folders is extremely confusing, har…

Agreed that the UI could be WAY more intuitive. There are issues with it default-opening for saving to an unwritable directory (confusing people), not being clear about why you're there (no way to instruct the user what purpose they're selecting a file for except the "open"/"save" button), the side drawer is not intuitive for new Android users who might not know there are more services beyond the Download folder, etc. There are too-limited sorting options, the MIME filtering could be extended, etc. Older versions of the framework didn't even let you suggest what saved files should be called...

In the case of a sophisticated media player like VLC I totally get your point. The solution before Q was just to ask for the READ/WRITE storage permissions and have full access. I guess they figure that's too broad access for one app to have.

Upsides-- it works great on Chromebooks, integrating with ChromeOS well, and the convenience of seamlessly integrating a single UI with numerous cloud services with no extra SDKs to include or APIs to learn is also a big plus.

Re: Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber

#110

Post by jbk »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #108
jbk wrote: post #24

After porting VLC on so many platforms, to be honest, working on Android applications is not too bad. Notably compared to other mobile platforms. The tools and IDE are quite good (they need a lot of RAM though), the deployment is easy, the development workflow simple enough and the devices are easy (and cheap) to come by. Even the Play Store console is not catastrophic. A contrario from Youtube, you can get questions…

You're the guy behind VLC for Android? Amazing job, it really is an essential app I couldn't live without! The only problem is years pass and I still can't find how to turn a directory into a playlist without hand-checking every single file in it (for me this usually means hundreds).

On the folder, in the directory view, click on the play button and then save the playlist
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