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How are you evaluating the Android build if you don’t use Android and you don’t know Kotlin?
by fourside 23d ago
How are you evaluating the Android build if you don’t use Android and you don’t know Kotlin?
- user43928 23d agoYou just install it on your phone and use the app. Maintainability concerns are entirely overblown by people who don't use agentic AI to develop large mobile apps, but anyway give their opinion as if they had that experience. I put in a few hundred hours, and I reached the same conclusion as Shopify. With reviews from other models and then a manual QA pass the result is fully usable.
- masom 23d ago> You just install it on your phone and use the app. OP says they don't have an android phone...
- arkits 23d agoAndroid studio has a emulator
- atonse 22d agoI used the emulator - but just like I can use an iOS app for 30 seconds and tell you whether it feels native or not, I can't do the same for Android, since I'm not a daily user of Android phones. And in the past, I didn't care because when I was manually building the app, I would just do my best with react native. But now that I can actually sweat the details (with the help of agents), I do want to hear from android users and use as many OS-native APIs and features.
- user43928 23d agoI missed that. I'd order a cheap Android phone to have a device in hand instead of working only with the simulator.
- atonse 22d agoOthers on our team use Android phones. So when I said that we spent the next few days actually polishing it, that's where others came in, providing feedback when they used it. I could only sweat the details on liquid glass, etc because I'm a daily iOS user.
- paxys 23d agoNo, they said they don't use android so don't know the native UX. You can test your app on the platform and confirm that the functionality all works, but how well it adheres to the platform's design language is subjective and hard to say if you aren't used to the platform.
- asdfsa32 23d agoI am using Gemini as well as Opus on a somewhat small project in React Native and I can not imagine this thing being able to build the whole thing on its own without it being a dumbpster fire. Can you share some details of how you work? What models? What harness?
- user43928 23d agoI use Codex and Claude Code desktop apps. I generally use only the SOTA, now Astra and Fable 5.1, Opus 5 when Fable runs out. I don't know if Gemini is suitable. I had few issues with my native iOS app, the results are just decent after a few iterations, the models do what I ask them to do. Where do you see the problem? The LOC for my app is now at almost 200k + 110k lines of test code.
- cschep 22d ago[flagged]
- prisonguard 22d agocan't believe what has become of this profession
- prisonguard 22d agowhat in the gobbledygook is this
- chis 23d ago> Opus
- asdfsa32 22d ago> Are there cybersecurity concerns in the frontend? I would have thought you have to assume the client is untrusted and only do security work on the backend. I hate software engineering now.
- 22d ago
- littlecranky67 23d agoSame result here just using plain Opus 4.8+. I had a web ap with a PWA approach. Now I have an iOS app written in Swift/SwiftUI and an Android app in Kotlin in the appstores. I do not know how to code a single line of Swift or Kotlin. You just test the app and iterate with the AI over it until it is stable and does what it should.
- prisonguard 22d ago> I do not know how to code a single line of Swift or Kotlin sounds like your app is nothing serious
- littlecranky67 22d agoWhy would you asume that, and how do you define serious? Ever since the iOS appstore presence I get more signups from organic app store searches + installs, which results to some percentage in new daily+monthly active users. Meaning: People use the native app and keep using it. That is how I would define have value, as it provides value to the users - else they wouldn't be using it.
- zingar 22d agoMy main agentic coding side project is something that I can't justify paying the apple developer license for. If I was an Android person or I didn't have to pay the developer license, maybe I'd just go for it.
- littlecranky67 21d agoAndroid got wirse than Apple. It costs 25 dollar now to get ID verified (mandatory) and before you can publish in the Ply store you need 12 betatester that install the app from a special link - those testers must keep the app installed 14days. Only then will you become visible publicly in the play store. So you end up paying people on Fiverr to do it which costs more than 99€
- croes 23d ago> You just install it on your phone and use the app. That‘s how you check functionality but that’s not how you get the bugs in the code.
- user43928 23d agoThat's the part covered by the other model's review. That together with manually verifying the functionality results in output that works.
- croes 22d agoIf you don’t know the language you can’t evaluate if the models really found bugs. That’s like translating a text to another language without knowing the language
- Daishiman 22d agoThis is wildly overblown. I've been working with agents for a good while, read tens of thousands of generated Python and the language factor is actually the part they get right that humans don't.
- nicce 23d ago> You just install it on your phone and use the app. Some people on the cybersecurity side are starting to cry....
- user43928 23d agoI have been getting these comments often here, including concerns about my non existent backend's security. Last time, when I pointed out that the attack surface for mobile apps is typically very small, some users started to talk about zero day vulnerabilities in the OS's media handling, as if it was a concern for my app implementation. I found the concerns again wildly overblown.
- freeplay 22d agoBut what if someone discovers a iOS 0day worth several million dollars and burns it to compromise your app specifically? /s
- joenada 22d agoYou sound like a person who's never had their app pen tested. The attack surface is anything but small if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.
- Perz1val 23d agoWhy? The api has to be secure. Mobile os keeps the app safe. Where is the attack surface?
- dakolli 23d agoDamn, we really gotta get rid of the vibe coders. Bad things are on the horizon if we keep encouraging these naive habits.
- ndbe 23d agoYes, what type of "engineering" is this? "I click the button and I see if it works or not" holy shit.
- atonse 22d agoHow do you propose getting "rid" of "Vibe coders" (which I'm assuming you're pooling me into?)
- applfanboysbgon 22d agoSevere financial liability for security breaches, severe enough that, for instance, companies which leak 1m+ user data are driven to bankruptcy [yes, this would also get rid of the previous generation of 1000-JS-lego vibers]
- player1234 22d ago[dead]
- elvis10ten 22d agoI work as a professional app developer. And I find this take to be naive. Most of the time when I review code from AI, there is always something to improve. It’s either a maintenance issue. e.g., Opus recommended and implemented a fix for a database corruption crash. This was ~400 lines of code with many moving parts. I reviewed, and found out Android Room library already handles this recovery case, and all I needed was a 10 liner PR that catches this exception and ignores it. The maintenance is not only the burden on the human and LLM. With too many moving parts, it becomes harder and harder to build and verify the correctness of future features. Yes you can write test for this and that, but it didn’t need to exist in the first place. The second problem is correctness issues. Especially the edge cases. You cannot just manually test out a race condition on a phone! Sometimes it happens! Sometimes it doesn’t! If it leads to a visible signal like a crash, then yes, you can try to reproduce it. But there are a lot of these that are “silent” and would just lead to bad experiences. We already had a software quality crisis! And I think such views only exacerbate the situation! Quality matters! And this is not an anti-AI stance. I vibe code personal projects where I don’t even look at the code. But when I use AI as a professional engineer, I act like a professional. Because these products do have an impact on people’s lives.
- user43928 22d agoSo you don't use agentic AI to develop a large mobile app and you think my take is naive? I also used to work full time as a Android developer for five years, and I'm pretty sure I know better than you about the quality of my app that I work on everyday.
- elvis10ten 22d agoNo where did I say we don’t do agentic dev! Years of experience doesn’t mean much! I will challenge you on ideas. And the idea you are sharing is dangerous and unprofessional. Especially at scale. e.g., we process more than 3.5 billion orders annually! This is serious business. Edge cases are common.
- dboreham 22d agoAll true (and thanks for posting a concrete example rather than "LLMS suck"). But my take is that none of this is much different than before times when I had teams of developers creating applications. They would often make similar mistakes which I would either need to catch or which would flush out in the field. Where it seems that LLMs are not excellent is where the person driving it is also the senior domain expert so can immediately spot pitfalls. But typically using humans to develop software this was really not often the case. Those people get promoted so they're no longer cutting the code. Under that scenario (replacing subordinate humans) I find the current models are either on-par or somewhat better (specifically because the models can also act like a peer senior dev, discussing approach options etc).
- majormajor 22d agoThat's a recipe for regressions as the amount of surface you have to cover with "just...use the app" gets bigger and bigger. You can write more automation to test it. But that's also how you end up with ever-growing test run times. There are much better ways that aren't just "throw out the LLM" either. You just need to be more focused on throughput. Requiring manual validation can pretty rapidly require more hours than just sanity-checking code by hand, even (and I'm not advocating that for every use case, either.) I can't afford manual QA passes if I'm gonna go as quickly as I want to.
- collingreen 23d agoSeriously! What a bonkers thing to claim. "I had codex use maestro so I assume it made Android work well and idiomatically". It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem, which makes me feel fear in my heart when I imagine the first "production is down" page coming in. I already hated mobile because it's so much harder to maintain than web (and I don't do any spyware or IAP so no benefits for me there); this yolo approach would give me constant dread. It shows that at least some software development is moving away from code and to product management instead. I'm not passing judgement on that; I actually think that's great for a lot of software. It is interesting to see the shift happening though and will be fun to see if the general quality of software noticeably changes over the next few years.
- jatins 23d ago> It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem, As much as I dislike it, I think that's the future of _all_ non-critical software (think social media, crms, CI, food delivery etc). Leadership in many companies is explicitly asking employees to have multiple agents running through the day and that will lead to this. Read this for example: https://www.uber.com/in/en/blog/efficient-software-factory/ https://www.uber.com/in/en/blog/efficient-software-factory/ . A very useful system, I am sure. But when you have AI at every layer from code to review to triaging, rest assured AI is the only know who knows your system. And you better hope it's not telling you that something is load bearing during an incident.
- stevelini 22d agoI read the article and couldn't understand it. I asked Gemini; Pareto things definitely sounds like science. I read the article again: - We had bugs. We let agents try to fix the bugs. True positive (fixed bug) is the F1 score. Here are the results for different models. Fixes worked 50% of the time. - We needed to find a query. Without a knowledge graph it took 20mins, and didn't work. We used a knowledge graph. It was fast (20s), and found the right thing. I gave my LLM my summary of the article and apparently I "hit the nail on the head". I have no clue if I learned anything.
- atonse 23d agoWe have people on the team that are android users. I just meant that I don't want to evaluate whether it feels "native" as I personally am not an Android user.
- moronicles 23d ago[dead]
- whatsThisBtn4 22d agoITT: people dealing with realities. Remember Chinese accounts on US Facebook say data centers are bad.
- MiroslavPokorny 22d agoRemember the first step to fixing any problem is admitting you have a problem. If you are blind, you cant see anything wrong, if you are deaf uou cant hear anything is wrong.