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My advice to a new Android developer: 1) The way things are done in the docs is often wrong on fundamental levels. Using libraries from the android team for e.
by ashark 10y ago
My advice to a new Android developer:
1) The way things are done in the docs is often wrong on fundamental levels. Using libraries from the android team for e.g. network comm is often wrong, even if it's "new and friendlier" (nope).
2) The docs are often outdated. Also their examples are always for exactly not the case you need. 100% of the time.
3) Stackoverflow posts are often outdated.
4) You will eventually hit a years-old bug that's been marked "obsolete" in Android's bug tracker. It isn't. There will be a billion workarounds for various Android flavors in the comments. There will be a patch for Android itself with pleas for them to apply and release it. They will not have. The Android team hates you.
5) Don't expect libraries for Google services to be better on their own damn operating system than they are for Javascript.
6) Just use all of Square's Android libraries and development practices. Retrofit, flow, and so on. [0]. In the best of all worlds Google would shutter the Android SDK/libraries team, acquihire Square, and hand it over to them.
[0] https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/simpler-android-apps-with-flow-and-mortar-5beafcd83761 https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/simpler-android-apps-w... (sorry, medium post :-( )
[EDIT] 7) the interfaces for many of the more complex UI elements seem to have been made by the interns. Don't be surprised when you have to resort to reflection to style them.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoBased on your post I can't ever imagine wanting to develop Android apps.
- dboreham 10y agoOr any software ;) But it's "situation normal" for most software development activities, no?
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoIs it? And if so, I can see the reluctance amongst some to call us a proper engineering field.
- devgutt 10y agoBut you can always check the code easily and figure out how something actually works. Not the best solution, but it saved me more than once when the documentation or stack overflow doesn't suffice.
- kabdib 10y agoN+1) Android vendors who think they know what they are doing will make customizations that utterly screw you (e.g., mucking with date/time pickers to the point that they are busted on some random set of phones). N+2) Oh, so you want to make a buildbot that does stable builds based on known versions of tools and libraries? What a quaint notion. [Can we just say that Activities and Intents died, or at least achieved effective bankruptcy as actual abstractions, around the time the 32nd flag modifying behavior was added? At some point you need to step back, take an honest look at what developers are actually doing and realize that things are simply not working out. All that anyone does with the UI framework is to try different things and "twist knobs" until the apps seems to work, and hope that it doesn't break much in the future.]
- pitaj 10y agoThis kinda thing makes me glad I'm in web dev.
- ReverseCold 10y agoSo it's not just me then. Good to know, I thought I was going crazy.