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I haven't done Android dev in a few years, but last time I did the best advice a new dev could get was, "ignore any best-practice or how-to element of Google's

I haven't done Android dev in a few years, but last time I did the best advice a new dev could get was, "ignore any best-practice or how-to element of Google's Android docs. Ignore the old, official way of doing [thing]. Definitely ignore the new, official way of doing [thing]. Instead, use Square's Android libraries, read their blog posts, and do exactly what they do."

PicassoCTs 5y ago
Sounds like a very Open-Source approach. Ignore the documentation, ignore the tutorials, grab the Repo of a working project close to what you want and read the code, until you can modify it.
- intergalplan 5y ago
  Kinda, but Square actually had an alternative way of managing UI flow, enabled by a couple libraries they wrote, and a bunch of other support libraries for basic stuff like making HTTP requests, all of which was so much saner than Google's standard way(s) of doing things. You'd end up writing Square/Android, in the sense of GNU/Linux, if that makes sense. Why Square, of all places, straight-up killed it on that particular platform, I have no idea (no shade intended to folks at Square, it's just unexpected situation). It's not like they just had a really good project template or something.
  - myko 5y ago
    > but Square actually had an alternative way of managing UI flow Are you talking about Flow/Mortar? Those were pretty much abandoned and were, imo, overly complex. That said, the Android UI flow was pretty bad before. Hopefully Compose makes it better. IIRC Square had a technical manager (maybe CTO level?) who came from Android at Google, which may have helped. Square also open sourced early iOS tools like PonyDebugger which were ahead of the game when they came out. When they hired Jake Wharton they got a stellar champion of open source software creation whose focus was Android.
izacus 5y ago
This has pretty much stopped a few years ago, most of the community has now standardized on AndroidX set of Google helper libraries for UI, UI state management, on-device storage and async code.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

Sounds like a very Open-Source approach. Ignore the documentation, ignore the tutorials, grab the Repo of a working project close to what you want and read the code, until you can modify it.

intergalplan 5y ago
Kinda, but Square actually had an alternative way of managing UI flow, enabled by a couple libraries they wrote, and a bunch of other support libraries for basic stuff like making HTTP requests, all of which was so much saner than Google's standard way(s) of doing things. You'd end up writing Square/Android, in the sense of GNU/Linux, if that makes sense. Why Square, of all places, straight-up killed it on that particular platform, I have no idea (no shade intended to folks at Square, it's just unexpected situation). It's not like they just had a really good project template or something.
- myko 5y ago
  > but Square actually had an alternative way of managing UI flow Are you talking about Flow/Mortar? Those were pretty much abandoned and were, imo, overly complex. That said, the Android UI flow was pretty bad before. Hopefully Compose makes it better. IIRC Square had a technical manager (maybe CTO level?) who came from Android at Google, which may have helped. Square also open sourced early iOS tools like PonyDebugger which were ahead of the game when they came out. When they hired Jake Wharton they got a stellar champion of open source software creation whose focus was Android.

izacus 5y ago

This has pretty much stopped a few years ago, most of the community has now standardized on AndroidX set of Google helper libraries for UI, UI state management, on-device storage and async code.