Why don’t designers take Android seriously? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#141

Post by redacted » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 12:26 AM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #133

szatkus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cheapest Android phone I found costs 50 euro. You can easily find feature phone for 15-20 euro.

Depends where you live. In Ireland, for instance, if you walk into a shop wanting a prepaid phone, you're pretty much getting an Android, with most telecoms. Three, for instance (generally the cheapest major telco), currently lists precisely one non-Android phone in its under-100 euro category, and it's not a feature phone, it's a Symbian smartphone. The rest of its cheap phones are Android, mostly 2.3 and 4.0/4.1. Y…

Three, and every other telco, has a vested interest in getting you to buy something that they can sell you data for [1]. Argos will sell you an unlocked Samsung phone for 19 euro, Nokia for 25.

[1] of course, Three doesn't let you use that data because their network is a joke, but that's another story from the annals of "Ireland may be wealthy, but our infrastructure sucks so hard CERN has a contender for accidentally opening black holes in atmosphere"

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#142

Post by psionski » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 11:11 AM UTC

logn wrote: post #31

>A browser permanently playing catch-up will always be an additional, potentially redundant, layer in the technology stack. If a single OS ends up running >90% of the world’s connected devices, why bother writing software for the browser? I can't agree here. I think the OS world will be fragmented for a very long time (forever) and that the browser world will always have a core set of functionality to write apps once…

Also it spares you from having to write Java, or worse - Objective C. I went for HTML5 just because I could use a (relatively) sane language and not be forced in walled gardens in the process - like having to buy a $3000 Mac to use a language that looks like it's straight from the 80's (and now they're trying to get me to buy a Mac just so I can view the console output of my Javascript app - I'm starting to think Apple HATES the people that develop software for their devices).

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#143

Post by psionski » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 11:14 AM UTC

mrottenkolber wrote: post #126

I don't take native apps in general seriously. The future will be cross platform web apps, and even if its not, I couldn't be arsed to write software for proprietary platforms.

Buy a $3000 Mac computer so you can write software in a language that doesn't work anywhere else (and for a good reason)? Sure, where do I sign up :D

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#144

Post by vorg » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 11:05 AM UTC

rquirk wrote: post #89

weixiyen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android Studio is the recommended IDE for any new projects. It's made by JetBrains, and it's 100x better.

I do not like Eclipse - it is clunky and often requires restarts to pick up changes or clear itself of confusion - and have never used Android Studio, but AFAICT the latter is still not the recommended editor according to the Android documentation - https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html says "If you're a new Android developer, we recommend you download the ADT Bundle to quickly start developing apps." The ADT…

> On the Studio page it warns "Caution: ... you may encounter bugs"

Android Studio only added Gradle, which provides Groovy for its scripting, recently. Groovy has a history of shipping standalone versions as soon as possible and letting users find the bugs, and only afterwards does Grails bundle the version. I'd say Gradle-bundled sits somewhere between standalone and Grails-bundled on the testing scale for Groovy versions.