I invested lot of years on Android because it is, promoted as open source etc ... but currently it is just their advertising platform, complete control of it developer (removing developer accounts, blocking apps and devices ) and full monopoly !!
Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
31–40 of 166 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#32I regret not knowing about cross-platform development such as Flutter and ReactOS. I also regret not buying a book explaining all the concepts in as simple a manner as possible. As a semi-amateur programmer, I feel like most of the documentation is meant to refresh the memories of people who have been developing apps for years; they're extremely beginner-hostile.
To be honest, I think you're being too generous.
The problem isn't that they're providing documentation which is good but only appropriate for a narrow audience. The documentation is just bad: it misses out things that need to be said.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#33On the iOS side, I regret not knowing how horrible Xcode is and how horrible Apple's documentation is. On the Android side, I regret not realizing that no matter what kind of slick new well documented APIs Google releases we will all be writing code for Android 4.4 for the rest of our lives. Also, I wish I knew mobile developers are some of the lowest paid developers other than game industry peons.
I have recently looked at surveys in my country and mobile developers are one of the most paid programmers out there, especially the ones experienced with Swift. What does cause the low pay in your country? Logically the sector is ever expanding and there is always demand for hires with any experience.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#34I regret not knowing about cross-platform development such as Flutter and ReactOS. I also regret not buying a book explaining all the concepts in as simple a manner as possible. As a semi-amateur programmer, I feel like most of the documentation is meant to refresh the memories of people who have been developing apps for years; they're extremely beginner-hostile.
To be fair, most cross-platform projects have been total garbage (PhoneGap, Titanium, etc.) Sadly the only one decent was .. Unity, which is why you'll sometimes see things that aren't even games written in it for mobile.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don’t get me wrong, iOS is great, and I love it to death. However, the baggage signals to me that a massive opportunity to start anew has been missed. I guess that's what Flutter is doing (for both iOS and Android).
> I guess that's what Flutter is doing (for both iOS and Android). How does it do this as opposed to adding yet one more layer? Does it somehow get beneath all the cruft mentioned?
Flutter took the approach of treating the screen as a blank canvas. Everything is drawn using Skia primitives, exposed as Dart libraries.
It has some downsides – they had to expose a lot of accessibility features on top of that using platform APIs – but it's quite nice when you are a developer, as you can Cmd-click on anything to learn how it is drawn, and use the same tools to build your own widgets if you need.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#36I regret thinking that Xamarin was a good idea.
Amen. Management at a company I worked as were convinced that Xamarin was One True Path for mobile development. They were sold the idea that a Windows dev could instantly be productive in Xamarin without needing to understand the underlying platforms significantly. To be clear, I do think Xamarin remains an interesting idea, but it's absolutely not the first thing I'd reach for when starting a x-platform mobile proje…
> but it's absolutely not the first thing I'd reach for when starting a x-platform mobile project.
What would you go with now?
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don’t get me wrong, iOS is great, and I love it to death. However, the baggage signals to me that a massive opportunity to start anew has been missed. I guess that's what Flutter is doing (for both iOS and Android).
> I guess that's what Flutter is doing (for both iOS and Android). How does it do this as opposed to adding yet one more layer? Does it somehow get beneath all the cruft mentioned?
Afaik Flutter is basically a Game Engine. Its not using the build in UI Toolkit instead rendering everything itself and just mimics the look of the native UI.
I'm not completely sure about it, i just now it from listening to some talks.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don’t get me wrong, iOS is great, and I love it to death. However, the baggage signals to me that a massive opportunity to start anew has been missed. I guess that's what Flutter is doing (for both iOS and Android).
> I guess that's what Flutter is doing (for both iOS and Android). How does it do this as opposed to adding yet one more layer? Does it somehow get beneath all the cruft mentioned?
Yes. It's not using any native UI widgets or UI code, but drawing everything itself using the lowest level API it can get, which I guess on iOS is Metal (and something for input). This means that the look and feel and the behavior and accessibility features will not match those of other apps (which do use the native toolkits), or the Flutter team will have to do a lot of reverse engineering and re-implementation to match that on each platform.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#39I regret not knowing that Android API is awful.
Then I regret looking into Nativescript, because it was pretty buggy.
Then I regret not knowing about Flutter earlier.
THEN I regret not knowing that Flutter is pretty buggy as well.
Next step is me trying to learn other frameworks, like Cordova or React Native. I wonder what my regrets will be.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#40On the iOS side, I regret not knowing how horrible Xcode is and how horrible Apple's documentation is. On the Android side, I regret not realizing that no matter what kind of slick new well documented APIs Google releases we will all be writing code for Android 4.4 for the rest of our lives. Also, I wish I knew mobile developers are some of the lowest paid developers other than game industry peons.
this applies to web developers as well. too many devs on both web and mobile, so salaries are lower then rest of IT technologies. usually a web/mobile dev needs to know a lot more to make it on the same par, at which point you can argue is a full stack one anyway.