It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by izacus » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:29 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #162

izacus wrote: post #141

Just like the web platform, Android is hugely improved when you leverage the community libraries and tools they provided. Gradle actually helps a lot with that, since its clear dependency management makes use of external libraries a breeze. If in 2016 you're still complaining about AsyncTasks and its management, you certanly have missed a lot of progress in the last few years. It's not unlike having people complain a…

> Just like the web platform, Android is hugely improved when you leverage the community libraries and tools they provided. Which speaks a lot about the quality of work provided by the platform owner, when the community needs to step up.

Uhh, is there a platform there that isn't greatly improved by community libraries? At PSPDFKit we use a lot of additional third party tools and libraries on iOS as well, C++ practically needs community libraries to be usable, Python's biggest strength is in its excellent OSS library community, Ruby as well...

I mean, yeah, in perfect world we'd all have neatly packaged by Google, we'd write 6 lines of code and have the greatest app ever. But software development never kinda worked that way for me and I have a feeling it never will :/

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

#172

Post by hehheh » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:30 AM UTC

finchisko wrote: post #147

izacus wrote: post #141

Just like the web platform, Android is hugely improved when you leverage the community libraries and tools they provided. Gradle actually helps a lot with that, since its clear dependency management makes use of external libraries a breeze. If in 2016 you're still complaining about AsyncTasks and its management, you certanly have missed a lot of progress in the last few years. It's not unlike having people complain a…

Exactly. Criticize is easy. That guy should stop whining and rather enlighten us with his home brewed platform, language, tooling, etc.

You're allowed to point out a project's faults without having created an alternative version.

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

#173

Post by m_fayer » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:35 AM UTC

chinhodado wrote: post #41

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.…

I used to think Activity lifecycle management is complex. Then I learned about Fragments and I started to loathe every moment I have to work with them. What a bloated mess: http://staticfree.info/~steve/complete_android_fragment_life...

Otherwise known as the "lolcycle".

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

#174

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:35 AM UTC

izacus wrote: post #171

pjmlp wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just like the web platform, Android is hugely improved when you leverage the community libraries and tools they provided. Which speaks a lot about the quality of work provided by the platform owner, when the community needs to step up.

Uhh, is there a platform there that isn't greatly improved by community libraries? At PSPDFKit we use a lot of additional third party tools and libraries on iOS as well, C++ practically needs community libraries to be usable, Python's biggest strength is in its excellent OSS library community, Ruby as well... I mean, yeah, in perfect world we'd all have neatly packaged by Google, we'd write 6 lines of code and have t…

C++ isn't a platform with a platform owner.

Python's biggest strength that lead to its adoption was being a language with "Batteries Included".

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

#175

Post by aw4y » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:36 AM UTC

oh you'll be missed. I've worked on Android for ages, I don't remember in the last 3 years of one single AsyncTask I've used.

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

#176

Post by 0xFFC » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:38 AM UTC

macco wrote: post #164

0xFFC wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Overall, I wouldn't say Android is poorly designed, it's just mediocre I think it is mostly have to do with company's talent pool and focus. As far as I can see (I may be wrong, this is my estimate) Google tries hard to devote best talents to 1) ads and Search and it's maintaining 2) Chrome team 3) Google apps and services online and on iPhones. After these option they try to develop Android as kinda (I don't know w…

I really doubt that. By the way, I think Android UI works much better than iOS's.

>By the way, I think Android UI works much better than iOS's.

You should be specific about what about Android UI is better than iOS?

if you are saying android UI design is better than iOS , I agree , but remember Material design is not android's design. Google wants to expend to every platform, it is quite childish if we think they could expand to every platform without having professional UI design language for themselves. They designed Material design for all of their product, not just for android. Yes android was first one to adopt, and I really like Material design. So if you are talking about material design , it was not only for android, it was actually Google Design language, and I really like it.

But if you are talking about performance and how ui fits together, I disagree 100% , for example they didn't had splashscreen for long long time (If I remember correctly they adopt splash screen a year o two ago), every time you were going to open an app, you were noticing a blank screen for quite a long time some times(1,2 second) which was quite ridiculous. At the other hand iOS had fixed splash screen for quite long time. Some third party apps tried to develop splash screen of their own , but almost all the time result was not on par (not even close) with iOS counterparts. Right now their rotation animation have problems which can show itself under pressure. and so many thing I don't even remember right now.

I am not saying android is bad or something , android is wonderful product. But lets be honest, it is not core product for Google like chrome is, and it has huge problems. But its main advantage is its openness.

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

#177

Post by m_fayer » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:39 AM UTC

cel1ne wrote: post #108

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.

I agree completely. After a while I abandoned fragments completely and started using custom views everywhere. Life got much easier and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop - decreased maintainability, performance, robustness... something would bite me in the ass for "going my own way." But the shoe never dropped, life did get easier. Lesson learned.

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

#178

Post by cageface » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:40 AM UTC

izacus wrote: post #141

Just like the web platform, Android is hugely improved when you leverage the community libraries and tools they provided. Gradle actually helps a lot with that, since its clear dependency management makes use of external libraries a breeze. If in 2016 you're still complaining about AsyncTasks and its management, you certanly have missed a lot of progress in the last few years. It's not unlike having people complain a…

This is also very much the case with iOS. If you just stick to what Apple provides you're going to suffer a lot more than necessary. Libraries and tools like Snapkit, R.swift, Fastlane, and Alamofire sand off so many rough edges on the APIs and Xcode.

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

#179

Post by creshal » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:40 AM UTC

mobiuscog wrote: post #136

Android should drop Java. It's nothing like writing 'normal' Java, and the baggage that is bought along isn't worth the effort. I like Java. I hate Android development.

Do you still need to do manual malloc/free inside Java code to handle images in Android? That crap tripped me up when developing for it ca. 2011.

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

#180

Post by lucb1e » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:42 AM UTC

At least Android doesn't require me to buy a Windows license or Mac computer (not just the license: OS X requires Mac hardware which is notoriously expensive). I'll keep it at Android.