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Very YMMV in my experience. Coming from an iOS codebase that had eschewed XIBs and storyboards entirely in favor of pure code views, I was disappointed to find

Very YMMV in my experience. Coming from an iOS codebase that had eschewed XIBs and storyboards entirely in favor of pure code views, I was disappointed to find that it's very difficult to write pure code UIs with Android Framework. Everything is geared toward XML layouts with many things being impossible or impractical to access from Java/Kotlin, which is extremely frustrating. And in place of code signing troubles, Android brings new challenges with things dependency management and ProGuard silently snipping out big pieces of required code if you don't tell it exactly what to do.

myko 6y ago
> Everything is geared toward XML layouts with many things being impossible or impractical to access from Java/Kotlin, which is extremely frustrating. Compose has been available for awhile now and the views are done in code (and is much more functional than SwiftUI - it even gets bug fixes and works on older versions of Android) > Android brings new challenges with things dependency management and ProGuard silently snipping out big pieces of required code if you don't tell it exactly what to do. iOS has similar problems, eg mixing SPM with Carthage or Cocoapods, having to strip symbols from fat frameworks, libraries that don't ship xcframeworks or do but don't support the arch you need, bitcode, etc.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  Compose is nice, but as noted elsewhere in the comments it's not of much help unless you're starting a new project. It won't be worth it to rewrite existing views for a few more years at minimum. Re: dependencies, take-up of SwiftPM has been lightning fast and a lot of projects can move to it already. It still has a few rough edges but for my use case it's a massive improvement over Cocoapods/Carthage as is.
  - myko 6y ago
    We've been integrating Compose into older projects without many issues at all. What have you run into? Re: SPM - it is a huge improvement! But it has some issues (behaves differently on the CLI vs Xcode, Xcode support is basic and lacks control) and not every dependency has moved to it yet, especially proprietary SDKs. Combining it with Carthage/Cocoapods is a pain - worse than dealing with ProGuard imo.
jayd16 6y ago
Again, I think these fall under Android vs iOS and not Android Studio vs Xcode. Although it does get fuzzy when Xcode is the only way to do something in the iOS stack.

myko 6y ago

> Everything is geared toward XML layouts with many things being impossible or impractical to access from Java/Kotlin, which is extremely frustrating. Compose has been available for awhile now and the views are done in code (and is much more functional than SwiftUI - it even gets bug fixes and works on older versions of Android) > Android brings new challenges with things dependency management and ProGuard silently snipping out big pieces of required code if you don't tell it exactly what to do. iOS has similar problems, eg mixing SPM with Carthage or Cocoapods, having to strip symbols from fat frameworks, libraries that don't ship xcframeworks or do but don't support the arch you need, bitcode, etc.

kitsunesoba 6y ago
Compose is nice, but as noted elsewhere in the comments it's not of much help unless you're starting a new project. It won't be worth it to rewrite existing views for a few more years at minimum. Re: dependencies, take-up of SwiftPM has been lightning fast and a lot of projects can move to it already. It still has a few rough edges but for my use case it's a massive improvement over Cocoapods/Carthage as is.
- myko 6y ago
  We've been integrating Compose into older projects without many issues at all. What have you run into? Re: SPM - it is a huge improvement! But it has some issues (behaves differently on the CLI vs Xcode, Xcode support is basic and lacks control) and not every dependency has moved to it yet, especially proprietary SDKs. Combining it with Carthage/Cocoapods is a pain - worse than dealing with ProGuard imo.

jayd16 6y ago

Again, I think these fall under Android vs iOS and not Android Studio vs Xcode. Although it does get fuzzy when Xcode is the only way to do something in the iOS stack.