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I honestly cannot grasp this idea that Android dev is more difficult than web dev. Especially when, to get started with Android, you just download Android Studi

I honestly cannot grasp this idea that Android dev is more difficult than web dev. Especially when, to get started with Android, you just download Android Studio (1 tool). To get started with web development, you have any number of competing or complimentary or overlapping tools, the combination of which seems to change every week.

ld00d 9y ago
IME, it doesn't get much more complicated than web development. Even as fragmented as Android can be, it's nothing compared to the number of frameworks, build systems, scaling challenges, operating systems, browsers...
hysan 9y ago
I don't think that Android dev is necessarily more difficult than web dev, but rather, the first few steps in learning Android dev are much bigger steps than the first few in web dev. It's a lot easier in web dev to get something working, build upon it, add tools, and learn about the complexity of the ecosystem in small steps. On Android, you are hit with that complexity almost immediately. Combine that with tutorials that are either out of date or completely fall apart the second you try to do anything beyond a Hello World app (that compatibility matrix sentence is very real), and you get the feeling that Android dev is much harder.
vanilla_nut 9y ago
I agree coming from the perspective of somebody who has a computer science degree and 5+ years of C-style language experience... but maybe you should consider the learning curve here for somebody who only has experience with web dev. Getting used to typing, compilation (though I'd argue Intellij makes this mostly invisible, and akin to a linter), not having the DOM (and getting used to Android's XML layout system instead), strings.xml, and other shenanigans would make things hard at first. I think if you want to make a lot of relatively small projects, web dev might be easier for a while. But as your projects start to scale up in size, having proper inheritance, compilation, a type system, etc. has growing benefits.

ld00d 9y ago

IME, it doesn't get much more complicated than web development. Even as fragmented as Android can be, it's nothing compared to the number of frameworks, build systems, scaling challenges, operating systems, browsers...

hysan 9y ago

I don't think that Android dev is necessarily more difficult than web dev, but rather, the first few steps in learning Android dev are much bigger steps than the first few in web dev. It's a lot easier in web dev to get something working, build upon it, add tools, and learn about the complexity of the ecosystem in small steps. On Android, you are hit with that complexity almost immediately. Combine that with tutorials that are either out of date or completely fall apart the second you try to do anything beyond a Hello World app (that compatibility matrix sentence is very real), and you get the feeling that Android dev is much harder.

vanilla_nut 9y ago

I agree coming from the perspective of somebody who has a computer science degree and 5+ years of C-style language experience... but maybe you should consider the learning curve here for somebody who only has experience with web dev. Getting used to typing, compilation (though I'd argue Intellij makes this mostly invisible, and akin to a linter), not having the DOM (and getting used to Android's XML layout system instead), strings.xml, and other shenanigans would make things hard at first. I think if you want to make a lot of relatively small projects, web dev might be easier for a while. But as your projects start to scale up in size, having proper inheritance, compilation, a type system, etc. has growing benefits.