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> Relying on Apple may fuck us over in the future, but Android would be fucking us from the start. Sometimes having it tough from the start is good, especially

> Relying on Apple may fuck us over in the future, but Android would be fucking us from the start. Sometimes having it tough from the start is good, especially if it forces you to build something more flexible. Not so good if you go on a crusade to fix every edge case specifically. I'm speaking generally and definitely not "defending" Android here, as the platform does need too much edge-case-fixing which is usually overwhelming for small shops.

reitoei 10y ago
> the platform does need too much edge-case-fixing which is usually overwhelming for small shops Do you mean that by simply choosing Android as a platform, you're automatically incurring a ton of technical debt?
- egeozcan 10y ago
  It depends. If you want to support a lot of devices / screens / versions / defaults / settings / mods / roms / whatever else I forgot, then, yes. You can always target a sane subset, which makes the number of edge-cases manageable for a smaller team. I had a WebView that I used to display PDFs in my application then I realized some versions of the internal browser didn't support opening PDFs. For those devices, I tried to create an intent (Was it called that? It has been so long), only to learn that many didn't come with a PDF viewer at all. So I created a service to render PDFs to images server side. A bug in the browser messed up the layout (pages with both orientations existed in documents and even a humble table layout couldn't make them display reliably across the devices). I started loading the images and displaying them in a native view. Then I had memory problems in some devices. Then I started lazy-loading each page. That seemed to work but users from smaller screens complained about double-tap-hold-zoom thing. And so on...
  - reitoei 10y ago
    Thanks for the detailed answer. Went through a similar thing myself with a "hybrid" app. Nightmare.

reitoei 10y ago

> the platform does need too much edge-case-fixing which is usually overwhelming for small shops Do you mean that by simply choosing Android as a platform, you're automatically incurring a ton of technical debt?

egeozcan 10y ago
It depends. If you want to support a lot of devices / screens / versions / defaults / settings / mods / roms / whatever else I forgot, then, yes. You can always target a sane subset, which makes the number of edge-cases manageable for a smaller team. I had a WebView that I used to display PDFs in my application then I realized some versions of the internal browser didn't support opening PDFs. For those devices, I tried to create an intent (Was it called that? It has been so long), only to learn that many didn't come with a PDF viewer at all. So I created a service to render PDFs to images server side. A bug in the browser messed up the layout (pages with both orientations existed in documents and even a humble table layout couldn't make them display reliably across the devices). I started loading the images and displaying them in a native view. Then I had memory problems in some devices. Then I started lazy-loading each page. That seemed to work but users from smaller screens complained about double-tap-hold-zoom thing. And so on...
- reitoei 10y ago
  Thanks for the detailed answer. Went through a similar thing myself with a "hybrid" app. Nightmare.