5 ms·

Hopefully this starts the ball rolling on Android tablet apps. I really love my Nexus 7, but the app selection is definitely inferior to what's available for iO

Hopefully this starts the ball rolling on Android tablet apps. I really love my Nexus 7, but the app selection is definitely inferior to what's available for iOS.

GuiA 14y ago
You know, I have a feeling that this might come, in major (but non integral) part from the Android SDK. Objective C & Cocoa just have an extra layer of polish to them that I believe contributes highly to the resulting level of quality of the app
- eropple 14y ago
  I'd agree with that. I switched from an iPhone 4 and an iPad 2 to a Galaxy Nexus and a Nexus 7, in part because of a new job as an Android developer and in part because I just couldn't put up with the OS anymore. I absolutely hate Objective-C and Xcode, but even I have to admit that the Android SDK is kind of crap. Even in Eclipse its integration isn't very good (though I use IntelliJ as my IDE, which is finally catching up) and the documentation is just awful, badly-written stuff that desperately needs the attention of a good technical writer or twelve. I can totally buy that app quality is negatively impacted because very little makes sense and there's not a lot of documentation to straighten you out.
  - king_jester 14y ago
    It's been a while since I jumped into Android dev, so I'm curious if you could elaborate more on the things you are finding annoying and/or confusing. Also, are there things about Android development that you like more than iOS development?
    - eropple 14y ago
      I never did iOS development in anger; I just really, really don't like Obj-C or Xcode from dealing with OS X programming. A few things that come to mind off the top of my head: -Again, the documentation isn't well-written. It almost all feels like it's written either by an engineer with little writing experience or a technical writer without engineering experience. There have been times when I've had to re-read passages over and over again because I genuinely couldn't parse what they were trying to say. -The insistence on weak typing everywhere is insane. Intents are sloppy, weakly-typed junk; Messages ditto. The R auto-generated class isn't bright either--even if you need an integer index, at least wrap it in a type-safe class to eliminate the possibility of passing the wrong thing around. I really do genuinely like working in Java, but I like working in well-designed Java. This is the same company that made Guava, which is perhaps the most elegantly designed API I know of in Java-land. But many of Android's APIs treat classes as an incidental hindrance. -Dalvik blows. There is nothing good about it and there's so much that's bad about it. The class limit is crippling, and the lack of hot-loading is prohibitive. (I write games in my spare time, I'd love to be able to use Groovy as a scripting layer, but that's not going to happen.) -This might sound crazy, but XML is a machine-readable format. People know that, right? Okay, great. So why are the tools for building layouts so much junk? Not on this list is fragmentation, because I don't find that to be a real problem for my purposes. My app for work is 4.0+ only, and I test on a Galaxy Nexus; if it works there it'll work on a SIII or an Atrix HD or whatever else somebody wants to try. (We're outsourcing wide device testing to uTest, but our app isn't done so I haven't had the opportunity to try their services.)
      - levesque 14y ago
        >Dalvik blows. The single thing that almost got Google into big trouble with Oracle is a weak point ;)
        eropple 14y ago
        Yup. Different is not always wrong, but different-and-worse is.
      - TillE 14y ago
        For games, I'd definitely recommend the NDK, which lets you write cross-platform code with OpenGL. Or just go with Unity and C#.
        eropple 14y ago
        I don't really have any interest in dealing with Unity (to me, it's not programming) or C++. I generally use libgdx for messing around/prototyping. I'd be more likely to go to Mono than the NDK, though that too is a lot of work.
      - luke_s 14y ago
        I think many of your points are valid. In any large SDK there will be rough edges, and you have pointed out several of them. However I would like to post a contrary opinion, just because I know that many people who have never done Android development will read this and think 'yup, android development blows'. I've been working with the Android SDK for a few years now, and I haven't found any of the things you mentioned to be a major hindrance. Personally I think the documentation is just fine - Perhaps I haven't been poking around the same corners of it that you have, but the tutorials have always been helpful and the design guide is very good. The weak typing is again an annoyance. However in all my time I can say, that I have only run into one bug that was caused by weak typing and that was on the R auto-generated class. Typically your strings are a R.strings, colours are at R.colours, etc so it makes it pretty easy to spot if you are passing a string through where you should be passing a colour. I did java dev back in the 1.1 and 1.2 days - now that JVM sucked! Dalvik, again I have never had any problems with. As for the GUI design tools, they are probably some of the best I have seen. Definitely better than the tools that I was using to do Swing dev work back in the day. So yes, all those things you mentioned could do with some more polish. But I have found my Android dev experience to be good one and the android SDK is more than adequate to develop some pretty hefty apps!
levesque 14y ago
What kind of app do you find yourself wishing for? The apps I use the most are the default apps, i.e. Calendar, Mail, Chrome, Reader (google version) and Google+/Facebook/Twitter.
- codeulike 14y ago
  Official scrabble app. Scrabble on iPad is awesome. Also, please dont mention Words With Friends.
  - moultano 14y ago
    I agree. High quality board-game apps seem to be the biggest gap on android tablets. I love Elder Sign: Omens https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fantasyflightgames.ESAndroid&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5mYW50YXN5ZmxpZ2h0Z2FtZXMuRVNBbmRyb2lkIl0 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fantasyfli... but that's the only one I've found to be really high quality. Carcasonne and Catan aren't as good as their ios equivalents. While I'm plugging tablet board game apps, this implementation of backgammon is Awesome. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.njsoftware.backgammonnj&feature=nav_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDNd https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.njsoftware... It regularly wipes the floor with me on higher difficulty levels, and has a lot of really nice features.
    - gurkendoktor 14y ago
      > High quality board-game apps seem to be the biggest gap on android tablets. Probably because Android has traditionally focused on 7" tablets. Board games are the one area where I wish my iPad 3 was bigger. :(
- adhipg 14y ago
  A high quality simple sketching app like Paper by 53 on the iPad.
  - moultano 14y ago

Hopefully this starts the ball rolling on Android tablet apps. I really love my Nexus 7, but the app selection is definitely inferior to what's available for iOS.

GuiA 14y ago

You know, I have a feeling that this might come, in major (but non integral) part from the Android SDK. Objective C & Cocoa just have an extra layer of polish to them that I believe contributes highly to the resulting level of quality of the app

eropple 14y ago
I'd agree with that. I switched from an iPhone 4 and an iPad 2 to a Galaxy Nexus and a Nexus 7, in part because of a new job as an Android developer and in part because I just couldn't put up with the OS anymore. I absolutely hate Objective-C and Xcode, but even I have to admit that the Android SDK is kind of crap. Even in Eclipse its integration isn't very good (though I use IntelliJ as my IDE, which is finally catching up) and the documentation is just awful, badly-written stuff that desperately needs the attention of a good technical writer or twelve. I can totally buy that app quality is negatively impacted because very little makes sense and there's not a lot of documentation to straighten you out.
- king_jester 14y ago
  It's been a while since I jumped into Android dev, so I'm curious if you could elaborate more on the things you are finding annoying and/or confusing. Also, are there things about Android development that you like more than iOS development?
  - eropple 14y ago
    I never did iOS development in anger; I just really, really don't like Obj-C or Xcode from dealing with OS X programming. A few things that come to mind off the top of my head: -Again, the documentation isn't well-written. It almost all feels like it's written either by an engineer with little writing experience or a technical writer without engineering experience. There have been times when I've had to re-read passages over and over again because I genuinely couldn't parse what they were trying to say. -The insistence on weak typing everywhere is insane. Intents are sloppy, weakly-typed junk; Messages ditto. The R auto-generated class isn't bright either--even if you need an integer index, at least wrap it in a type-safe class to eliminate the possibility of passing the wrong thing around. I really do genuinely like working in Java, but I like working in well-designed Java. This is the same company that made Guava, which is perhaps the most elegantly designed API I know of in Java-land. But many of Android's APIs treat classes as an incidental hindrance. -Dalvik blows. There is nothing good about it and there's so much that's bad about it. The class limit is crippling, and the lack of hot-loading is prohibitive. (I write games in my spare time, I'd love to be able to use Groovy as a scripting layer, but that's not going to happen.) -This might sound crazy, but XML is a machine-readable format. People know that, right? Okay, great. So why are the tools for building layouts so much junk? Not on this list is fragmentation, because I don't find that to be a real problem for my purposes. My app for work is 4.0+ only, and I test on a Galaxy Nexus; if it works there it'll work on a SIII or an Atrix HD or whatever else somebody wants to try. (We're outsourcing wide device testing to uTest, but our app isn't done so I haven't had the opportunity to try their services.)
    - levesque 14y ago
      >Dalvik blows. The single thing that almost got Google into big trouble with Oracle is a weak point ;)
      - eropple 14y ago
        Yup. Different is not always wrong, but different-and-worse is.
    - TillE 14y ago
      For games, I'd definitely recommend the NDK, which lets you write cross-platform code with OpenGL. Or just go with Unity and C#.
      - eropple 14y ago
        I don't really have any interest in dealing with Unity (to me, it's not programming) or C++. I generally use libgdx for messing around/prototyping. I'd be more likely to go to Mono than the NDK, though that too is a lot of work.
    - luke_s 14y ago
      I think many of your points are valid. In any large SDK there will be rough edges, and you have pointed out several of them. However I would like to post a contrary opinion, just because I know that many people who have never done Android development will read this and think 'yup, android development blows'. I've been working with the Android SDK for a few years now, and I haven't found any of the things you mentioned to be a major hindrance. Personally I think the documentation is just fine - Perhaps I haven't been poking around the same corners of it that you have, but the tutorials have always been helpful and the design guide is very good. The weak typing is again an annoyance. However in all my time I can say, that I have only run into one bug that was caused by weak typing and that was on the R auto-generated class. Typically your strings are a R.strings, colours are at R.colours, etc so it makes it pretty easy to spot if you are passing a string through where you should be passing a colour. I did java dev back in the 1.1 and 1.2 days - now that JVM sucked! Dalvik, again I have never had any problems with. As for the GUI design tools, they are probably some of the best I have seen. Definitely better than the tools that I was using to do Swing dev work back in the day. So yes, all those things you mentioned could do with some more polish. But I have found my Android dev experience to be good one and the android SDK is more than adequate to develop some pretty hefty apps!

levesque 14y ago

What kind of app do you find yourself wishing for? The apps I use the most are the default apps, i.e. Calendar, Mail, Chrome, Reader (google version) and Google+/Facebook/Twitter.

codeulike 14y ago
Official scrabble app. Scrabble on iPad is awesome. Also, please dont mention Words With Friends.
- moultano 14y ago
  I agree. High quality board-game apps seem to be the biggest gap on android tablets. I love Elder Sign: Omens https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fantasyflightgames.ESAndroid&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5mYW50YXN5ZmxpZ2h0Z2FtZXMuRVNBbmRyb2lkIl0 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fantasyfli... but that's the only one I've found to be really high quality. Carcasonne and Catan aren't as good as their ios equivalents. While I'm plugging tablet board game apps, this implementation of backgammon is Awesome. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.njsoftware.backgammonnj&feature=nav_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDNd https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.njsoftware... It regularly wipes the floor with me on higher difficulty levels, and has a lot of really nice features.
  - gurkendoktor 14y ago
    > High quality board-game apps seem to be the biggest gap on android tablets. Probably because Android has traditionally focused on 7" tablets. Board games are the one area where I wish my iPad 3 was bigger. :(
adhipg 14y ago
A high quality simple sketching app like Paper by 53 on the iPad.
- moultano 14y ago