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Don't know if it's a dead end or not, but both the apis and the developer tools are a massive clusterf#%k compared to Apple and Microsoft. Just one head scratch

by 0xbear 9y ago

Don't know if it's a dead end or not, but both the apis and the developer tools are a massive clusterf#%k compared to Apple and Microsoft. Just one head scratcher after another, especially if you dare to support older versions. In comparison, Apple has a relatively pain free API, and lets you access it with one of the most elegant languages I've ever programmed in (Swift). After delving into Android just for a bit, it is no surprise that there are so few decent, non-trivial apps for it, and even Google's own apps work better on iOS.

chickenbane 9y ago
Interesting POV, but I'd much rather develop for Android than any other platform. You are correct that currently developing for Android is not for the faint of heart. Happily, it also turns out understanding Java and Gradle and IntelliJ is generally useful for a software engineer and let me develop for many more targets and vendors than one. And since all the components are all open source, the community can provide excellent updates, bugfixes, support, libraries, frameworks, etc. Not to bash on Swift, but even with the incoming Swift 4 they still don't even have an ABI compatibility story (leading to bigger apps since they to bundle the runtime, and framework/library devs can't offer binaries), and they even had to break source compatibility (though the compiler will have a flag to compile Swift 3). And since most Android app development actually depends on the Android Support Libraries, you can provide great compatibility to current devices. Whereas - and this is according to iOS devs - supporting the latest version of iOS usually means abandoning supporting previous versions. Also, I heard the newest xcode 9 just got refactoring support - cute!
- akmarinov 9y ago
  Your argument is moot, if you replace Swift with Objective C. Also you don't have to abandon previous iOS versions to support the latest, it just doesn't make sense to when 90% of the users are on the latest.

by 0xbear 9y ago

chickenbane 9y ago

Interesting POV, but I'd much rather develop for Android than any other platform. You are correct that currently developing for Android is not for the faint of heart. Happily, it also turns out understanding Java and Gradle and IntelliJ is generally useful for a software engineer and let me develop for many more targets and vendors than one. And since all the components are all open source, the community can provide excellent updates, bugfixes, support, libraries, frameworks, etc. Not to bash on Swift, but even with the incoming Swift 4 they still don't even have an ABI compatibility story (leading to bigger apps since they to bundle the runtime, and framework/library devs can't offer binaries), and they even had to break source compatibility (though the compiler will have a flag to compile Swift 3). And since most Android app development actually depends on the Android Support Libraries, you can provide great compatibility to current devices. Whereas - and this is according to iOS devs - supporting the latest version of iOS usually means abandoning supporting previous versions. Also, I heard the newest xcode 9 just got refactoring support - cute!

akmarinov 9y ago
Your argument is moot, if you replace Swift with Objective C. Also you don't have to abandon previous iOS versions to support the latest, it just doesn't make sense to when 90% of the users are on the latest.