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> I find the software stack looks like hold together with duck tape. That’s how I feel about the Android platform! Non-upstream Android and Samsung specific p

by _mlbt 3y ago

> I find the software stack looks like hold together with duck tape. That’s how I feel about the Android platform! Non-upstream Android and Samsung specific patches on the Linux kernel, a weird Franken-Java runtime that doesn’t support modern Java features, which means most developers use Kotlin now to make for a tolerable developer experience. There’s tons of compatibility libraries that must be bundled with your app to account for the fact that a significant amount of your user base will be running embarrassingly old versions of Android, each with their own unique set of features and bugs. Like you said though, to each their own.

realusername 3y ago
That's the same on Apple side, custom kernels for each device except you can't see them at all and the user space is even more Frankenstein than Android. At least on Android the system apps are actually real apps with real APIs! Anything related to icloud, accounts and the appstore is in a state of decay with custom patches all over the place which break if you are not 100% on the expected happy path. Sometimes just traveling abroad, adding a foreign credit card or upgrading the OS makes the whole thing not work anymore. (Yes all of those happened to me) And I'm not going to talk about the dev tooling for obvious reasons, it barely works and it's the worst dev environment I ever seen on all platforms. At least the users aren't going to see it, that's the upside I guess.
- _mlbt 3y ago
  What specific issues do you have with the dev tooling on iOS? I've actually found Xcode and the simulator to be pretty nice to work with and haven't encountered any show stopping bugs. I've noticed the vast majority of issues I do run into can be quickly solved by doing a clean rebuild of my project.
  - realusername 3y ago
    Xcode takes 13GB and the updater is not capable of resuming downloads, if your internet stops, well here you go again from the start. The whole thing is as sluggish as an electron app and each click takes 2s to do anything. The app upload process is so broken, Apple themselves issued a third party tool to bypass it. The config format is undocumented and plays badly with git, I guess that's okay if you are working alone.

by _mlbt 3y ago

realusername 3y ago

That's the same on Apple side, custom kernels for each device except you can't see them at all and the user space is even more Frankenstein than Android. At least on Android the system apps are actually real apps with real APIs! Anything related to icloud, accounts and the appstore is in a state of decay with custom patches all over the place which break if you are not 100% on the expected happy path. Sometimes just traveling abroad, adding a foreign credit card or upgrading the OS makes the whole thing not work anymore. (Yes all of those happened to me) And I'm not going to talk about the dev tooling for obvious reasons, it barely works and it's the worst dev environment I ever seen on all platforms. At least the users aren't going to see it, that's the upside I guess.

_mlbt 3y ago
What specific issues do you have with the dev tooling on iOS? I've actually found Xcode and the simulator to be pretty nice to work with and haven't encountered any show stopping bugs. I've noticed the vast majority of issues I do run into can be quickly solved by doing a clean rebuild of my project.
- realusername 3y ago
  Xcode takes 13GB and the updater is not capable of resuming downloads, if your internet stops, well here you go again from the start. The whole thing is as sluggish as an electron app and each click takes 2s to do anything. The app upload process is so broken, Apple themselves issued a third party tool to bypass it. The config format is undocumented and plays badly with git, I guess that's okay if you are working alone.