6 ms·
Fuck You Android Framework (2018)
- droider 6y agoGoogle is just re-branding the Android with shiny languages like Kotlin. There is nothing left in the framework other than cluttered components.
- the_hoser 6y agoYikes. Maybe you should pick up web development. I'm sure it's less cluttered and simpler over there. Oh wait...
- es7 6y agoWeb development is way way simpler No one is forcing you to pick up a full Angular 2.0+RxJs stack
- the_hoser 6y agoYou've clearly never done professional web development, or you've only participated in green-field projects where you and one other person are the only ones working on it. I've never been allowed to pick the crap I have to maintain.
- gofreddygo 6y agoTrue, till you land a job where the worst possible combination is already cherry picked for your dismay.
- schwartzworld 6y agoWebDev is as simple or complex as you want it to be. You can write clientside software in a single file that will run on almost any computer or phone in the world without needing the user to install anything. And you can guarantee that breaking changes to the language will never render your app unrunnable. As apps' needs and the community of programmers gave grown, we have developed abstractions to make hard things easy. For example, you can build APIs in the language of your choice, often in a few lines of code. What is simpler than a Flask app?
- the_hoser 6y agoFalse, it's as simple or complex as your employer wants it to be.
- kitsunesoba 6y agoThere are some questionable complaints in this blog post (I have not encountered the issue with separate layouts for different DPIs, for example), but it’s true that native Android development is frustrating on a semi-regular basis, with some of the most unexpected and random tasks posing more of a challenge than they have any right to. I frequently find myself wishing I could write Android apps with Swift and UIKit. They have their own warts, but the majority of difficulties you’ll face with them involve more advanced/less used SDKs… its base UI components work very well and mostly act as one would expect them to, especially with the improvements to UICollectionView/UITableView brought in iOS 13. Way fewer surprise NullPointerExceptions too thanks to Swift being a much cleaner break from Objective-C than Kotlin is from Java.
- suyash 6y agoThis is the truth, Android API's are poorly designed, Architecture is like a spaghetti code and fragmentation of the OS is horrible in comparison with iOS which sends a message how much Google cares vs Apple about developers and User Experience. Not to mention Kotlin, still love Java and prefer to use that.
- guessbest 6y agoI suppose that since this is over 2 years old (Jan 20, 2018) all of the developers complaints have been addressed.
- suyash 6y agoyou must be joking, it's trending today because it still resonates with us.
- scotty79 6y agoI wouldn't bet on it. I tried to write stuff for android a decade ago and it was horrible. Then tried 5 years later when they released Android Studio. Still roughly just as horrible. I'm not keen on trying it now. I'll give it another 5 years or a decade. And it's not that I have thin skin. I find web development pretty nice and have no qualms about all of the js libraries.
- sterlind 6y agoI tried my hand at an Android app.. the experience made me feel stupid. There's so much boilerplate and yet none of them guides you towards any sensible app architecture. I'm a systems programmer, but I was able to pick up Vue and Bootstrap and cobble together a functional dev UI in a week, despite not knowing JavaScript. I tried and failed with vanilla Android Studio, then decided to try the "Android Jetpack" guides which led me to third-party libraries with broken codegen. It's just not fun, you know? Apps should be fun to make.
- scotty79 6y agoAndroid reminds me of MFC for Windows development. Instead of reasonable way to build my app I get unguided tour over implementation details of the platform.
- ncmncm 6y agoFuck you, dim candle, for causing me to stumble in the darkness. Android framework is a dancing bear. What is remarkable is not how well it dances, but that it can be made to dance at all. This is not to excuse Alphabet, who are entirely well-enough equipped to make something actually good, if they could be bothered.
- scotty79 6y ago> This is not to excuse Alphabet, who are entirely well-enough equipped to make something actually good, if they could be bothered. Are they though? What's a good developer thing that came from google and is not a niche blackbox?
- schwartzworld 6y agoGoLang seems pretty popular.
- scotty79 6y agoOk. I must agree with that.
- Apocryphon 6y agoFlutter? As an iOS dev, I've considered learning that to build Android apps rather than the actual native Android SDK, just because the framework sounds worse to manage. I don't think it's too hard for Google to build a better SDK, if they really wanted to. I think it's hard to get users to adopt it, despite its benefits.
- snodnipper 6y agoI have been developing Android apps since the beginning, although I have cut back my time on Android largely because it is a filthy experience. How many times have we mashed the feedback button and still end up with a terrible emulator? A non-issue for iOS folks. Flutter represents a great opportunity imho to uplift development capability and avoid needless fragmentation. It reminds me of Adobe's Flex in some ways and I can assure you that I have _never_ had such a productive client-side development environment since! Flex united developers, graphic designers, animators etc. 3 second build times...worked on everything even if the runtime was cough 'sketchy'. I'd love to see Chet Haase move onto Flutter and resume similar videos to his Adobe days. As for all of the Kotlin noise, like much of Android this is "movement not progress" and yet another example of fragmentation. I certainly like many aspects of Kotlin _but_ Java 14 is very nice AND enables greater participation from different roles (e.g. lower barrier to entry for the Spring Boot camp). I'd love to see Google uplifting the Java / JVM community and support modern Java syntax on Android. As for Google building a better SDK, clearly the Android and Flutter teams do not see eye to eye...but maybe there will be lessons learned for both. I will be keeping an eye on Fuchsia with respect to developer tooling.
- talentedcoin 6y agoThis post would have been a lot easier to read without all the “fuck”s.
- Koshkin 6y agoThere must be a browser extension for hiding selected words (an "F-block" or something).
- billylo 6y agoNote to Google: Please hire the author. It's a little harsh, but I feel his pain too.
- Apocryphon 6y agoFor a more recent critique: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21308192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21308192
- _4jlx 6y agoWow, this is the post I wasn't brave enough to write. Been developing in android for ~3 months for school and I still do not fully understand how to load listviews, and not for lack of trying. I want to know who this guy is so I can shake their hand.
- karmakaze 6y agoAfter having learned the hoops to do this properly (with recycling etc) I wish I hadn't. Unless I really have you, I'd much rather write a Flutter app without the legacy Android APIs--writing COBOL might actually be less painful.
- bobbyz 6y agoTo be perfectly honest, if I were to write an android app today I would probably rather learn RN or Flutter then do native android again.
- jariel 6y agoMany of the decisions to put in these aspects were not well thought through - they were 'neat ideas' that were just implemented. It's amazing how many bad UI patterns get replicated through the years by teams with little experience or who don't use their own frameworks. Also - it's a hard problem.
- lightlyused 6y agoFrom 2018.
- canada_dry 6y ago> From 2018. And yet still so relevant today.
- gofreddygo 6y agoFucking developer hours for over a decade.
- arkanciscan 6y agoeats popcorn and builds websites
- ffhhj 6y agoeats popcorn, builds both web and mobile apps with WebView+HTML5
- arkanciscan 6y agoeats popcorn and installs PWA
- gofreddygo 6y agoI hope this inspires a 'Fuck you Angular' post. There's enough frustration in the land of the WebDevs.
- troughway 6y agoOut of curiosity - what are some complaints about Angular? In particular, 8+? I'm asking OP as well as anyone else who wishes to comment.
- gofreddygo 6y agoTake any angular js app with more than 200 LoC. Migrate it to angular 8. Feel the pain. Angular 8 is over engineered, there are a million pieces that make the app work; any of which can and do break. With the code freeze by EOD, you're trying out different compiler options just so you can get the console error to stop and pass the build. There's this unfathomable love for typescript that is designed to dumbify the js dev population. For config, There's angular.json, tsconfig.json, webpack-config.json, tsconfig-app.json and package.json to start with. There's @component, @inject, @injectable. And you also have to know @component inherits @directive. And while you're ramping up with this don't forget ngc and ng-packgr. Check ng-cli version before compiling. And yeah, do this before the next angular release, which is in next month.
- isbadawi 6y agohttp://hateangular.blogspot.com/ http://hateangular.blogspot.com/
- rapjr9 6y agoI remember when this kind of thing used to be called "job security" by developers, the useless complexity meant more work and more jobs. Now it's apparently become so messed up (in part as an effort to lock developers into one platform) that it's made development work hell. Perhaps developers are somewhat complicit for not objecting sooner?
- troughway 6y agoBased on the article it sounds more like a case of shitty developers. There is no job security in mobile apps.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- UncleMeat 6y ago> Fuck you for providing such a great security to my app that any fucking idiot can decompile it and do whatever he wants. IMO, there are a lot of poor complaints here but this one takes the cake. What could possibly be done to prevent people from being able to decompile apks? Should anything be done? This strikes me as the antithesis of software freedom.
- hilbert42 6y agoBloody wonderful, I wish I could write like that. He's correct of course. And it's great to know I'm not alone (we need to start a club methinks).
- MangoCoffee 6y agowhat's the alternative?
- tandr 6y ago(a bit meta) I love how there is not even 1 answer 24 hours after you have asked that question...
- joaosardinha 6y agoThere's no way that the people supporting this aren't just bored contrarians too, 90% of these complaints are just false, I was expecting a twist from the first half until I realized it wasn't satire.
- Apocryphon 6y agoMaybe other people have had a different Android development experience from you.
- anupamchugh 6y agoThe reasons I switched to iOS are summed up really well in this article.