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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

#81

Post by gjolund »

pizzacowboy wrote: post #61
gjolund wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double that complexity if you also want a web app that works across all modern browsers. I wish the big 4 would get their act together and stop pissing on each others legs. FB is the most recent entry into this clusterfuck. They should be ashamed of the Oculus/GearVR developer experience, it was the determining factor in my abandoning Oculus. It is the developer that pays the cost in the end.

Aw, that makes me sad. I've been telling myself I'm going to get into the VR scene and dive in with Oculus. I was hoping it would be a dev-friendly environment.

Like other's have said, Unreal/Vive is a much better platform.

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

#82

Post by 0xFFC »

yincrash wrote: post #78
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…

What are examples of the iOS app of a Google product being better than the Android one? Also, can I ask which OS you primarily use for mobile?

Just Google it.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12109832/google-apps-iphone...

There is so much articles and news about it. It is completely rational decision. Google like any other company at the end wants to maximize its profit, and iPhone is where the money is (Google it, 84% of profit of whole market goes to apples pocket_ I don't remember exact number).

I have used HTC desire around 2011 (I don't remember the exact model name) and my gf was using Samsung note (around the same time) the experience was disaster, no updates, bloated software, no bug fix, nos security fixes. Nothing,pure marketing and pure rip off. After a year I switched to Nexus line and my gf using iPhone. We haven't thought about buying anything else since then.

And right now , with this update problem Google imposing on Nexus line, my last hope for Android is dieing and I am considering buying iPhone. I switched from Nexus 4 to Nexus 5. It is unacceptable to me, device as capable as Nexus 5 doesnt get N update. Why would I use Android when I have better support, long term update with iPhone almost for same price (I could have bought iPhone 5 for 100$ 150$ more when I bought Nexus 5. Which was total mistake)

And remember developing for Android is what I do for living. So I am so enthusiastic about androids future.

I have really high hopes for Windows 10 phone. Their continum can be game changer. And don't forget Google is not software company, they are IT company. But Microsoft is different, they are biggest most successful software company in humankind history. They know how to develop software. The problem with their failure was stupid manager (Steve ballmer). Which is now solved. I hope they can compete with iPhone with their surface phone line. We will see how it is going to pan out.

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

#83

Post by chickenbane »

I do not think writing Android apps is straight-forward and would not recommend it to new developers or engineers like the author who want to do other things like iOS. People's expectations for apps is only getting higher, and there are many, many things you need to understand in order to be a produce great Android apps.

As an example, another commenter noted the Android platform engineers not being opinionated about application development as a "lofty ideal", but more likely this is a consequence of the framework team having enough on their plate. The vanilla Java AOSP API surface (not even considering the NDK, support libraries, Google Services, etc.) is enormous. The Activity lifecycle is complicated, and it's very easy to leak memory or write spaghetti code. There are many ways to do similar tasks, and these also change with time. Etc.

That said, I love being an Android developer, and it is improving at an accelerated rate. To start, Android Studio and Gradle are far superior to the pain of getting Eclipse, Ant and the SDK tools working together.

Yes, Swift is awesome and shiny, but there is so much more to a platform than the language. Java has excellent tooling - great support for debugging, monitoring, automated testing for CI/CD (automated UI testing still needs work, but also improving), static analysis, etc.

The support libraries are also a godsend, enabling you to make an app that looks modern while being frequently updated and handling a lot of the compatibility headache from the platform's diversity.

Finally, there's a lot of great content online. The conferences are great and its expected to see their content on YouTube. Google's Android Developer YouTube channel is also fantastic (shout out to Jo and Ian!), and Google is slowly but surely improving the developer docs and integrating their sample code into Android Studio.

So yes, you do need to understand the new functional reactive approach. You need to know how to write a Gradle build. You have to understand the complexities of proguard rules. It's all pretty frustrating. But I also feel that many of the skills are more easily transferrable - I can also write a Gradle build for a library or I can use IntelliJ to better debug a servlet. With Swift and iOS, there's only vendor you can build for.

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

#84

Post by ec109685 »

exanddevxyz wrote: post #57

What is surprising is that google with their much celebrated hiring practices for senior devs managed to hire no one who could say no to such insanities like Fragments and Async and the entire Android dev platform/toolkit as it stands today. Apple, formerly famous for being design hippies who couldnt care less about performance, have topped the mobile performance charts for nearly a decade straight now and with no en…

Where do you base you claim about apple not caring about performance? They have pushed the performance envelope ever since the first Apple computer where Woz built it with way fewer chips than their competitors. Their ui's have always demanded extreme performance.

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

#85

Post by echelon »

ClayFerguson wrote: post #17

Developers do need to pick a set of core technologies, and stick to it or a career can fall apart I bet. I don't know from experience. I've been a Java DEV ever since MSFT tried to hijack the Java language with a proprietary version back in 1998, and I abandoned MSFT and never went back. I can imagine trying to be both iOS and Android developer would be about as insane as trying to be both .NET and Java developer. Oi…

> Developers do need to pick a set of core technologies, and stick to it or a career can fall apart I bet.

How boring! I'd go mad if I didn't get to work in new domains with different tools every so often.

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

#86

Post by fractalwrench »

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 change such as incrementing a version number is made, Android Studio grinds to a freeze syncing gradle files.

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

#87

Post by cloudjacker »

cloudjacker wrote: post #15

lol, I've had those sentiments employers are also skeptical you are content with both, I wouldn't consider it a value add unless you can land a lead position for a mobile team aside from working on multiple platforms diluting your experience with the latest development patterns, it is just as easy to be stuck maintaining an old project or legacy code with an employer. This isn't unique to mobile of course, but multip…

*competent, not content

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

#88

Post by pjmlp »

RivieraKid wrote: post #38
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…

> 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 day Eclipse CDT would be deprecated without any official path for NDK users

- Speaking of NDK, the four parallel paths to build applications (old ndk-buld, experimental Gradle plugin, stable plugin with ndk-build, stable plugin with cmake), each with its own set of issues

- Dalvik JIT/GC were always worse than the average J2ME /J2Embedded commercial offerings, regardless of how they used to sell the story of having to fork Java for performance

- Choosing to AOT on device instead of doing at the store like everyone else, thus leading to the half-backed solution in Android 7 that everything goes (interpreter in Assembly, JIT with PGO, AOT when docked).

- Android Studio just puts my computer fans in full throttle bringing back memories from Webpshere RAD, something that Eclipse CDT never did. And I am not a big Eclipse fan.

- Gradle needs a background daemon with 2GB of allocated memory to match Ant or Maven performance

- The SupportLibrary releases that are so well tested that always required a minor updated, because they always break something

- I do approve that the NDK is constrained due to security concerns, but being forced to use JNI to call libraries that are implemented in C++ like Skia?

- Forking Java community with cherry picked features from Java 6, 7 and 8. Which will only get worse now that Java 9 and 10 will bring features that will drastically change how the language is used (modules, linker, graal, value types, type inference,....).

There are plenty of other issues to rant about, these are just some of them.

They seem to just keep Android on some kind of "just good enough" for the masses. Literally the MS-DOS of mobile world.

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

#89

Post by weq »

ClayFerguson wrote: post #17

Developers do need to pick a set of core technologies, and stick to it or a career can fall apart I bet. I don't know from experience. I've been a Java DEV ever since MSFT tried to hijack the Java language with a proprietary version back in 1998, and I abandoned MSFT and never went back. I can imagine trying to be both iOS and Android developer would be about as insane as trying to be both .NET and Java developer. Oi…

I started as a Java dev in JDK1.1, moved to c# @ 1.3 and now apparently im an andriod and iOS dev too with Xamarin ;) I pretty much spent the last month creating a x-platform mobile app, i share 90% of my code across the server/client and havnt really even had to learn too much about the intricies of each platform to replace the current version of our product which was written in ObjC and Java.

I can program directly against viewControllrs or Activities, but i dont have to. I use Rx for all async stuff and my Views/Models are eventSourced just like my aggeregates an their views are on the server.

Not saying Xamarin is bee's knees or anything, it has its own quirks and own bugs, but in terms of andriod vs iOS dev, i dont have to buy into any of the core OS's to get the job done.

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

#90

Post by pjmlp »

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).

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