7 ms·

Maintaining an Android app in Google Play Store is a lot of work

156 points by ashishb 1y ago

tomjuggler 1y ago
Yeah I gave up on Android apps after Google broke mine so many times. Just make a web app, works everywhere
- ashishb 1y ago
  > Just make a web app, works everywhere I do that whenever possible, but you can't easily build a music player that plays local files.
jaoane 1y ago
> Displaying notifications didn’t require permissions, now after API 33, it requires POST_NOTIFICATIONS Good. Really tired of installing an app, forgetting about it, and then getting a bs notification a couple of days later to get me to open it again.
- ashishb 1y ago
  > Really tired of installing an app, forgetting about it, I don't think that app can send a notification to you anyway. An app that's never opened by the user cannot be launched programmatically and cannot run background code.
  - sumanthvepa 1y ago
    They probably mean that they installed the app, used it for a little while, and then, forgot about it.
  - Gortal278 1y ago
    Yes it can, many app do it.
  - cwillu 1y ago
    There's a difference between “never opened” and “only opened once”, and apparently the latter is sufficient to get notification spam days later. The mcdonalds app did this to me before I uninstalled it.
- anothernewdude 1y ago
  I believe you can long touch the notification to see an option to uninstall the app directly from the notification.
  - ashishb 1y ago
    Exactly. I use it all the time to disable over-aggressive notifications.
  - chrismorgan 1y ago
    And to disable specific categories of notifications. Unfortunately, the divisions are often done in what I can only imagine to be bad faith, so it’s not as useful as it should be. But then, most of the ones you want to disable were added in bad faith too, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
- muzani 1y ago
  A lot of the changes are due to dark patterns. This was nowhere near as bad as the one that broke access to files and gallery, which would break saves for old games. There was another new breaking change on notifications, which probably prevented spoofing. I'm still in full support of these. I keep telling people that social media apps are just massive violations of privacy and can just copy your password from clipboard or trace your location through images – I've been asked to code these at one time. At least these updates keep me from thinking I'm the paranoid one.
- izacus 1y ago
  Yep, if you look at those changes Android developers are whining about, it's mostly all curbing abusive apps, adding security and fixing privacy issues.
dlcarrier 1y ago
It's really copied from Apple's anti-consumer measures, which seem to be targeting free software. (Not just free as in speech, but also free as in beer.) A developer might not care whether or not a fun project earns them anything, but Apple and Google want their cut, so if they make distributing software through their store expensive and time consuming, the free stuff will fall by the wayside, so the only options for a simple tool are either ad-laden or have recurring expenses. Also, I used to think that getting an FPGA IDE up and running was the most painful, unreliable, and bloated development environment possible, then I met Android Studio.
- ashishb 1y ago
  > It's really copied from Apple's anti-consumer measures, which seem to be targeting free software AFAIK, Apple also charges $99 per year to maintain a developer account on the Apple App Store, effectively shutting out any hobbyists who would like to provide their app with no monetization. > the only options for a simple tool are either ad-laden or have recurring expenses. Unfortunately, that indeed seems to be happening.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
  The most effective way Google uses to keep free software out of the Play store is the search function and description rules. You can put free, user-friendly software into the Play store. The Play store shows whether software contains ads or in-app purchases. But the Play store doesn't let you search by those criteria, and IIRC developers used to be prohibited from clearly advertising the main distinguishing quality of their software in the title (couldn't find the rule in the policies anymore so this may have changed). Likewise, users can't search or filter for app size, which not only affects how much space the app eats on your phone but is also a great proxy for how much crap is bundled inside it. So in effect, the good apps will be impossible to find amid the sea of SEO-optimized and/or paid placements of ads that can afford to do that because they are full of ads.
  - muzani 1y ago
    Oddly enough, I try to search for paid software because if I buy a game, I want to be able to complete it. Not like pay $5/month to access half the game, and another $50 to get to the final 20%, and another $100 to get to the final 5%. It's not letting me do that either. Google Play Games (the separate app) has such a filter but it's seemingly random.
jbk 1y ago
And all this article is "just" about the building of the Java/Kotlin application :) Native NDK is another can of worms, with updates linked to SDK or sometimes not, unclear documentation about device and API compatibilities, compiler behavior changes and other requirements (like the 16K one) that impact so many 3rd party native libraries. But, of course, the rules on the uploading and the changes of the Console, that changes so often is what makes it painful. The absolute nightmare is about giving Google the root signing key of your application, the unfinished business about app bundles (which should reduce the size of the downloaded app, and more often than not, make it bigger), the changes in compliance, letters to sign for different countries, the compatibility for Google form factors (XR, TV, Auto, Automotive), Inline installs and other Teacher Progams, Play for family and so on. All of this changes non-stop and is very poorly documented :) At least, the Play Store is still GPLv2 compatible, so for now, we're saved (VLC)
- ashishb 1y ago
  > Native NDK is another can of worms Thanks for sharing this. I agree with your sentiment as one of my Android apps use vox SDK. However, my experience is very limited compared to you to write about it. > The absolute nightmare is about giving Google the root signing key of your application, I haven't and I don't think it is required. > the unfinished business about app bundles Can you elaborate what's unfinished here? > the compatibility for Google form factors (XR, TV, Auto, Automotive), My app is disabled for Android Auto in production. If I re-enable, then it gets rejected during the review. I have never been able to precise fix the issue they are raising to let me re-enable Android Auto. For Chromecast (TV), I have to run a web server inside the app to serve the media.
  - jbk 1y ago
    > I haven't and I don't think it is required. It is required, as soon as you have Android TV support, for example. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/11/app-bundles-for-google-tv-and-android-tv.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/11/app-bundle... See https://dev.to/npomepuy/vlc-for-android-updates-on-the-play-store-179j https://dev.to/npomepuy/vlc-for-android-updates-on-the-play-...
eviks 1y ago
> Upgrades for the sake of it > Material 2 was deprecated for Material 3. No clear migration guide was provided. I tried to upgrade Why would you do that? This is a self-inflicted wound that exactly matches the title. This isn't like another example of some important system library you need that gets removed, forcing changes > Crucial third-party libraries have been deprecated Since you've used them at this state for the whole of app's existence, you can continue to do so without any extra maintenance? I mean, if you view any non-breaking changes as breaking, especially when it comes to UI, the amount of maintenance is infinite anywhere.
- ashishb 1y ago
  > Since you've used them at this state for the whole of app's existence, you can continue to do so without any extra maintenance? Well, not, for example, "OkHttp 4.12.0 does not support Happy Eyeballs which is a major issue with IPv6 networks".
- ashishb 1y ago
  > Why would you do that? This is a self-inflicted wound that exactly matches the title. This isn't like another example of some important system library you need that gets removed, forcing changes As I mentioned elsewhere in the article, each library supports a certain version of Android; your old library will not support newer versions. E.g. API 33 onwards there is an edge-to-edge display, and older UI libraries won't be able to handle it.
  - izacus 1y ago
    Older UI libraries handle it just fine and there's no need to migrate Material at all. Really, material doesn't have anything to do with edge2edge.
    - ashishb 1y ago
      Not quite true. Old Exoplayer V2 cannot handle new media style notification that are used on API 33 and later.
askvictor 1y ago
I've given up on my hobby apps. The coding side is easy; the bureaucracy of the app store makes in completely not worth it unless you're a company.
postsantum 1y ago
That's nothing compared to the random lifetime bans if you step on some "high risk behaviour" triggers while publishing apps. With no recourse And then that absolutely retarted 12-testers rule
- stuart_real 1y ago
  [dead]
lutusp 1y ago
This fully reflects my own Android experience (https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus) -- writing Android apps is by no means a write-and-forget experience. As time goes by more of my apps are dropped from the platform from my unwillingness to drop everything and rewrite code for each new Android version. My original intent was to put my free, open-source apps on the platform, much as I had done before Android existed. But no -- Android doesn't work that way. My best-known Android app is SSHelper (https://arachnoid.com/android/SSHelper/ https://arachnoid.com/android/SSHelper/), a Secure Shell server meant for file transfers. Still works perfectly, dropped some time ago. TankCalc (https://arachnoid.com/android/TankCalcAndroid/ https://arachnoid.com/android/TankCalcAndroid/), same story. It's a well-known multi-platform app tank farm managers use to profile storage tanks. Still works, dropped from the platform. And not just mine. Many other free, first-rate Android apps -- Termux (https://termux.dev/ https://termux.dev/) comes to mind -- have been driven off the platform by Google's onerous demands and commercial focus. It's as though a wall is going up between people who like programming and people who like money.
muzani 1y ago
Agreed with the article. Some will say just do iOS/Cordova/React Native/Flutter. But these have all the same problems eventually. Do web? You're just pushing the problem of accessing lower levels (esp. files and camera) to the browser. Browsers are not consistent. Some devices don't even update their browsers and it would break POST on a very specific version of Android. There's a high end Samsung gallery that has a very inefficient way of displaying thumbnails. This is the default gallery. If the user has over 10000 photos or so, it freezes. People who buy this phone will often have a lot of photos. And they're rich; usually the investor. This bug doesn't show up in typical tests because QA can't afford this phone. So the fix is to avoid built in galleries, and write a custom gallery for the app that utilizes binary search or something. Major apps like FB and WhatsApp will have implemented their own in built gallery software so these device owners end up blaming the apps that don't.
- realusername 1y ago
  > But these have all the same problems eventually. I've maintainted a Flutter app and it's 10% of the maintenance of a normal Android or iOS app. The only real breaking change they had in 6 years was the switch to strict typing.
  - ashishb 1y ago
    So, are the Flutter library maintainers so good that they are able to abstract out all the changes that are happening to Android system libraries, Google's helper libraries, and the restrictions on the underlying platform?
    - realusername 1y ago
      Mostly yes, Flutter is insulated from the underlying platform. Rendering everything to a canvas has disadvantages but also advantages. Flutter doesn't need to care about most framework changes.
      - ashishb 1y ago
seanalltogether 1y ago
This is one area I will give Apple credit for. While their app store is a pain to navigate, their framework support and dev patterns have stayed pretty consistent since the early days of iOS. My companies iOS app today looks very similar to how it looked 9 years ago when we started it, aside from changing from objc to swift, it's still driven by core data, view controllers and storyboard views. Our android app on the other hand is kind of a Frankenstein app that started with Activities, Java, Sqlbrite, Butterknife, manual state management and Dagger, and has mostly transitioned to Fragments, Kotlin, Room, Data Binding, ViewModels and no Dagger. It's still quite a mess that we'll never have the budget to fix up properly.
- ashishb 1y ago
  I am curious, would an app, say a music player written for iOS in 2015, be usable in 2025? For Android, I can say that it would have to be re-written ~30% or so. The entire permission model has evolved - iOS style runtime permissions - permission to access local files - permission to display notification - special "Foreground service" to run the app in the background ... All of these emerged in the last 10 years.
J_cst 1y ago
[flagged]
fuomag9 1y ago
This is the exact reason why my app is not available on the play store anymore, combined with the fact that google wants to publish my address even though I'm NOT a trader in the EU
dedicate 1y ago
We treat our apps like they're finished paintings to be hung on a wall, but Google and Apple treat them like tamagotchis we have to keep alive.
Jyaif 1y ago
There's not 2 different versioning schemes, there's 3! Those clowns sometime use letters. Now you have to recite your alphabet just to know if one version is before or after.
- ashishb 1y ago
  > There's not 2 different versioning schemes, there's 3! Those clowns sometime use letters. Now you have to recite your alphabet just to know if one version is before or after. Yeah, thankfully, the alphabet one is mostly used in marketing. The other two show up in documentation interchangeably.
- izacus 1y ago
  For a developer, API level (an int) is and always was the relevant version.
chrismorgan 1y ago
The title submitted here is “Maintaining an Android app in Google Play Store is a lot of work”. I expected it to be focusing on Google policies around Play Store that make life hard, but really the only part that even touches that is the incidental “your app will get delisted if the minSdkVersion is too old” at the end. The actual article title omits “in Google Play Store”, and it would be good for that change to be made here too.
tslocum 1y ago
It is indeed a lot of work. All of my apps are only available on F-Droid now, after years of playing ball with Google Play. I wrote about my experience here: https://rocket9labs.com/post/on-the-importance-of-f-droid/ https://rocket9labs.com/post/on-the-importance-of-f-droid/
- guideamigo_com 1y ago
  What does the reach look like on F-droid?
like_any_other 1y ago
Reminds me of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ - I wonder if that's deliberate on the part of Google.
charcircuit 1y ago
>Toasts use to work for quick notifications, now, after API 31, it only works if the app is foreground. How to know if you app in foreground? You have to use ActivityLifecycleCallbacks for that and write ton of code and even then there are confusions about onStart vs onResume. Of course this can race with the check in the OS so I question if this is even a good idea in the first place. The check in the OS just checks if your app currently has a resumed activity. It doesn't require a ton of code. All activities receive a callback when they become resumed, onResume, and a callback when they are paused onPause. Yes you can use ActivityLifecycleCallbacks to have callbacks for all activities of your app in one place to track the state for each activity one place if you are not firing the toast from a specific Activity. The onStart callback is not relevant here. And the article that was linked improperly assumes that an app only has one Activity going through lifecycle events at once which is not true. The article is trying to solve a different problem, a problem that probably shouldn't need to be solved. It's trying to avoid callbacks when an app gets recreated when the device rotates, but nowhere else in the OS avoids such a thing. During rotations the OS freezes the display to hide the fact that your app is closing and reopening. It's going to be hacky to trying and pretend to stay open during such an event.
- ashishb 1y ago
  This comment itself proves what should have be `context.isInFoteground()` function call has been made more complicated.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    There isn't a single definition of what foreground means and typically usage of something like that would be a signal of poor design leading you to the point of wanting such a thing.
    - ashishb 1y ago
      Toast can only be displayed when the app is the foreground. If there is not single definition of what foreground is then how is someone supposed to know whether a toast will be displayed or not?
alongsampe 1y ago
off anything devices and pc
alongsampe 1y ago
off vr see

156 points by ashishb 1y ago

tomjuggler 1y ago

Yeah I gave up on Android apps after Google broke mine so many times. Just make a web app, works everywhere

ashishb 1y ago
> Just make a web app, works everywhere I do that whenever possible, but you can't easily build a music player that plays local files.

jaoane 1y ago

> Displaying notifications didn’t require permissions, now after API 33, it requires POST_NOTIFICATIONS Good. Really tired of installing an app, forgetting about it, and then getting a bs notification a couple of days later to get me to open it again.

ashishb 1y ago
> Really tired of installing an app, forgetting about it, I don't think that app can send a notification to you anyway. An app that's never opened by the user cannot be launched programmatically and cannot run background code.
- sumanthvepa 1y ago
  They probably mean that they installed the app, used it for a little while, and then, forgot about it.
- Gortal278 1y ago
  Yes it can, many app do it.
- cwillu 1y ago
  There's a difference between “never opened” and “only opened once”, and apparently the latter is sufficient to get notification spam days later. The mcdonalds app did this to me before I uninstalled it.
anothernewdude 1y ago
I believe you can long touch the notification to see an option to uninstall the app directly from the notification.
- ashishb 1y ago
  Exactly. I use it all the time to disable over-aggressive notifications.
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  And to disable specific categories of notifications. Unfortunately, the divisions are often done in what I can only imagine to be bad faith, so it’s not as useful as it should be. But then, most of the ones you want to disable were added in bad faith too, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
muzani 1y ago
A lot of the changes are due to dark patterns. This was nowhere near as bad as the one that broke access to files and gallery, which would break saves for old games. There was another new breaking change on notifications, which probably prevented spoofing. I'm still in full support of these. I keep telling people that social media apps are just massive violations of privacy and can just copy your password from clipboard or trace your location through images – I've been asked to code these at one time. At least these updates keep me from thinking I'm the paranoid one.
izacus 1y ago
Yep, if you look at those changes Android developers are whining about, it's mostly all curbing abusive apps, adding security and fixing privacy issues.

dlcarrier 1y ago

It's really copied from Apple's anti-consumer measures, which seem to be targeting free software. (Not just free as in speech, but also free as in beer.) A developer might not care whether or not a fun project earns them anything, but Apple and Google want their cut, so if they make distributing software through their store expensive and time consuming, the free stuff will fall by the wayside, so the only options for a simple tool are either ad-laden or have recurring expenses. Also, I used to think that getting an FPGA IDE up and running was the most painful, unreliable, and bloated development environment possible, then I met Android Studio.

ashishb 1y ago
> It's really copied from Apple's anti-consumer measures, which seem to be targeting free software AFAIK, Apple also charges $99 per year to maintain a developer account on the Apple App Store, effectively shutting out any hobbyists who would like to provide their app with no monetization. > the only options for a simple tool are either ad-laden or have recurring expenses. Unfortunately, that indeed seems to be happening.
tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
The most effective way Google uses to keep free software out of the Play store is the search function and description rules. You can put free, user-friendly software into the Play store. The Play store shows whether software contains ads or in-app purchases. But the Play store doesn't let you search by those criteria, and IIRC developers used to be prohibited from clearly advertising the main distinguishing quality of their software in the title (couldn't find the rule in the policies anymore so this may have changed). Likewise, users can't search or filter for app size, which not only affects how much space the app eats on your phone but is also a great proxy for how much crap is bundled inside it. So in effect, the good apps will be impossible to find amid the sea of SEO-optimized and/or paid placements of ads that can afford to do that because they are full of ads.
- muzani 1y ago
  Oddly enough, I try to search for paid software because if I buy a game, I want to be able to complete it. Not like pay $5/month to access half the game, and another $50 to get to the final 20%, and another $100 to get to the final 5%. It's not letting me do that either. Google Play Games (the separate app) has such a filter but it's seemingly random.

jbk 1y ago

And all this article is "just" about the building of the Java/Kotlin application :) Native NDK is another can of worms, with updates linked to SDK or sometimes not, unclear documentation about device and API compatibilities, compiler behavior changes and other requirements (like the 16K one) that impact so many 3rd party native libraries. But, of course, the rules on the uploading and the changes of the Console, that changes so often is what makes it painful. The absolute nightmare is about giving Google the root signing key of your application, the unfinished business about app bundles (which should reduce the size of the downloaded app, and more often than not, make it bigger), the changes in compliance, letters to sign for different countries, the compatibility for Google form factors (XR, TV, Auto, Automotive), Inline installs and other Teacher Progams, Play for family and so on. All of this changes non-stop and is very poorly documented :) At least, the Play Store is still GPLv2 compatible, so for now, we're saved (VLC)

ashishb 1y ago
> Native NDK is another can of worms Thanks for sharing this. I agree with your sentiment as one of my Android apps use vox SDK. However, my experience is very limited compared to you to write about it. > The absolute nightmare is about giving Google the root signing key of your application, I haven't and I don't think it is required. > the unfinished business about app bundles Can you elaborate what's unfinished here? > the compatibility for Google form factors (XR, TV, Auto, Automotive), My app is disabled for Android Auto in production. If I re-enable, then it gets rejected during the review. I have never been able to precise fix the issue they are raising to let me re-enable Android Auto. For Chromecast (TV), I have to run a web server inside the app to serve the media.
- jbk 1y ago
  > I haven't and I don't think it is required. It is required, as soon as you have Android TV support, for example. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/11/app-bundles-for-google-tv-and-android-tv.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/11/app-bundle... See https://dev.to/npomepuy/vlc-for-android-updates-on-the-play-store-179j https://dev.to/npomepuy/vlc-for-android-updates-on-the-play-...

eviks 1y ago

> Upgrades for the sake of it > Material 2 was deprecated for Material 3. No clear migration guide was provided. I tried to upgrade Why would you do that? This is a self-inflicted wound that exactly matches the title. This isn't like another example of some important system library you need that gets removed, forcing changes > Crucial third-party libraries have been deprecated Since you've used them at this state for the whole of app's existence, you can continue to do so without any extra maintenance? I mean, if you view any non-breaking changes as breaking, especially when it comes to UI, the amount of maintenance is infinite anywhere.

ashishb 1y ago
> Since you've used them at this state for the whole of app's existence, you can continue to do so without any extra maintenance? Well, not, for example, "OkHttp 4.12.0 does not support Happy Eyeballs which is a major issue with IPv6 networks".
ashishb 1y ago
> Why would you do that? This is a self-inflicted wound that exactly matches the title. This isn't like another example of some important system library you need that gets removed, forcing changes As I mentioned elsewhere in the article, each library supports a certain version of Android; your old library will not support newer versions. E.g. API 33 onwards there is an edge-to-edge display, and older UI libraries won't be able to handle it.
- izacus 1y ago
  Older UI libraries handle it just fine and there's no need to migrate Material at all. Really, material doesn't have anything to do with edge2edge.
  - ashishb 1y ago
    Not quite true. Old Exoplayer V2 cannot handle new media style notification that are used on API 33 and later.

askvictor 1y ago

I've given up on my hobby apps. The coding side is easy; the bureaucracy of the app store makes in completely not worth it unless you're a company.

postsantum 1y ago

That's nothing compared to the random lifetime bans if you step on some "high risk behaviour" triggers while publishing apps. With no recourse And then that absolutely retarted 12-testers rule

stuart_real 1y ago
[dead]

lutusp 1y ago

This fully reflects my own Android experience (https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus) -- writing Android apps is by no means a write-and-forget experience. As time goes by more of my apps are dropped from the platform from my unwillingness to drop everything and rewrite code for each new Android version. My original intent was to put my free, open-source apps on the platform, much as I had done before Android existed. But no -- Android doesn't work that way. My best-known Android app is SSHelper (https://arachnoid.com/android/SSHelper/ https://arachnoid.com/android/SSHelper/), a Secure Shell server meant for file transfers. Still works perfectly, dropped some time ago. TankCalc (https://arachnoid.com/android/TankCalcAndroid/ https://arachnoid.com/android/TankCalcAndroid/), same story. It's a well-known multi-platform app tank farm managers use to profile storage tanks. Still works, dropped from the platform. And not just mine. Many other free, first-rate Android apps -- Termux (https://termux.dev/ https://termux.dev/) comes to mind -- have been driven off the platform by Google's onerous demands and commercial focus. It's as though a wall is going up between people who like programming and people who like money.

muzani 1y ago

Agreed with the article. Some will say just do iOS/Cordova/React Native/Flutter. But these have all the same problems eventually. Do web? You're just pushing the problem of accessing lower levels (esp. files and camera) to the browser. Browsers are not consistent. Some devices don't even update their browsers and it would break POST on a very specific version of Android. There's a high end Samsung gallery that has a very inefficient way of displaying thumbnails. This is the default gallery. If the user has over 10000 photos or so, it freezes. People who buy this phone will often have a lot of photos. And they're rich; usually the investor. This bug doesn't show up in typical tests because QA can't afford this phone. So the fix is to avoid built in galleries, and write a custom gallery for the app that utilizes binary search or something. Major apps like FB and WhatsApp will have implemented their own in built gallery software so these device owners end up blaming the apps that don't.

realusername 1y ago
> But these have all the same problems eventually. I've maintainted a Flutter app and it's 10% of the maintenance of a normal Android or iOS app. The only real breaking change they had in 6 years was the switch to strict typing.
- ashishb 1y ago
  So, are the Flutter library maintainers so good that they are able to abstract out all the changes that are happening to Android system libraries, Google's helper libraries, and the restrictions on the underlying platform?
  - realusername 1y ago
    Mostly yes, Flutter is insulated from the underlying platform. Rendering everything to a canvas has disadvantages but also advantages. Flutter doesn't need to care about most framework changes.
    - ashishb 1y ago

seanalltogether 1y ago

This is one area I will give Apple credit for. While their app store is a pain to navigate, their framework support and dev patterns have stayed pretty consistent since the early days of iOS. My companies iOS app today looks very similar to how it looked 9 years ago when we started it, aside from changing from objc to swift, it's still driven by core data, view controllers and storyboard views. Our android app on the other hand is kind of a Frankenstein app that started with Activities, Java, Sqlbrite, Butterknife, manual state management and Dagger, and has mostly transitioned to Fragments, Kotlin, Room, Data Binding, ViewModels and no Dagger. It's still quite a mess that we'll never have the budget to fix up properly.

ashishb 1y ago
I am curious, would an app, say a music player written for iOS in 2015, be usable in 2025? For Android, I can say that it would have to be re-written ~30% or so. The entire permission model has evolved - iOS style runtime permissions - permission to access local files - permission to display notification - special "Foreground service" to run the app in the background ... All of these emerged in the last 10 years.

J_cst 1y ago

[flagged]

fuomag9 1y ago

This is the exact reason why my app is not available on the play store anymore, combined with the fact that google wants to publish my address even though I'm NOT a trader in the EU

dedicate 1y ago

We treat our apps like they're finished paintings to be hung on a wall, but Google and Apple treat them like tamagotchis we have to keep alive.

Jyaif 1y ago

There's not 2 different versioning schemes, there's 3! Those clowns sometime use letters. Now you have to recite your alphabet just to know if one version is before or after.

ashishb 1y ago
> There's not 2 different versioning schemes, there's 3! Those clowns sometime use letters. Now you have to recite your alphabet just to know if one version is before or after. Yeah, thankfully, the alphabet one is mostly used in marketing. The other two show up in documentation interchangeably.
izacus 1y ago
For a developer, API level (an int) is and always was the relevant version.

chrismorgan 1y ago

The title submitted here is “Maintaining an Android app in Google Play Store is a lot of work”. I expected it to be focusing on Google policies around Play Store that make life hard, but really the only part that even touches that is the incidental “your app will get delisted if the minSdkVersion is too old” at the end. The actual article title omits “in Google Play Store”, and it would be good for that change to be made here too.

tslocum 1y ago

It is indeed a lot of work. All of my apps are only available on F-Droid now, after years of playing ball with Google Play. I wrote about my experience here: https://rocket9labs.com/post/on-the-importance-of-f-droid/ https://rocket9labs.com/post/on-the-importance-of-f-droid/

guideamigo_com 1y ago
What does the reach look like on F-droid?

like_any_other 1y ago

Reminds me of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ - I wonder if that's deliberate on the part of Google.

charcircuit 1y ago

>Toasts use to work for quick notifications, now, after API 31, it only works if the app is foreground. How to know if you app in foreground? You have to use ActivityLifecycleCallbacks for that and write ton of code and even then there are confusions about onStart vs onResume. Of course this can race with the check in the OS so I question if this is even a good idea in the first place. The check in the OS just checks if your app currently has a resumed activity. It doesn't require a ton of code. All activities receive a callback when they become resumed, onResume, and a callback when they are paused onPause. Yes you can use ActivityLifecycleCallbacks to have callbacks for all activities of your app in one place to track the state for each activity one place if you are not firing the toast from a specific Activity. The onStart callback is not relevant here. And the article that was linked improperly assumes that an app only has one Activity going through lifecycle events at once which is not true. The article is trying to solve a different problem, a problem that probably shouldn't need to be solved. It's trying to avoid callbacks when an app gets recreated when the device rotates, but nowhere else in the OS avoids such a thing. During rotations the OS freezes the display to hide the fact that your app is closing and reopening. It's going to be hacky to trying and pretend to stay open during such an event.

ashishb 1y ago
This comment itself proves what should have be `context.isInFoteground()` function call has been made more complicated.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  There isn't a single definition of what foreground means and typically usage of something like that would be a signal of poor design leading you to the point of wanting such a thing.
  - ashishb 1y ago
    Toast can only be displayed when the app is the foreground. If there is not single definition of what foreground is then how is someone supposed to know whether a toast will be displayed or not?

alongsampe 1y ago

off anything devices and pc

alongsampe 1y ago

off vr see