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(This is the author of the original post.) My comments about the relative difficulty of building on top of SMS/MMS were somewhat of an aside. That difficulty di
by schvenk 13y ago
(This is the author of the original post.) My comments about the relative difficulty of building on top of SMS/MMS were somewhat of an aside. That difficulty did take us by surprise, but as you say, wasn't reason enough to leave Android on its own.
Once we'd decided to abandon the SMS/MMS approach, we were then building our functionality on top of a more straightforward messaging channel, and had to decide whether to proceed on Android or iOS. At that point we chose iOS for the reasons described.
- codeka 13y agoApart from the SMS/MMS issue, the rest of the article is about how you shouldn't used inexperienced developers to draw conclusions about a platform. This quote is very telling: "We discarded the iPhone prototype we had been working on for a few weeks, polished our rusty Java skills and had an Android alpha out by February 2013." If you'd said "we abandoned out Android prototype, polished our rusty Objective C skills, and released an alpha on iPhone" I'm certain you'd be saying exactly the same things, just about iOS development instead of Android.
- archagon 13y agoI don't know about that. 2 years ago, when I was first trying my hand at iOS development, I found it remarkably easy to get things working. The documentation, to my eyes, was simply excellent. I still find that to be the case.
- WWLink 13y agoI'm not sure if they've changed this, but I had a hard time finding good documentation for using autolayout constraints in code for a layout that was mostly created in code due to it changing depending on what the situation demanded. But I will agree Google's documentation is usually pretty short sighted and made by people that don't like writing documentation.
- sh1989 13y agoI struggled for a long time trying to understand how Relative Layouts work. It just didn't gel with me and I found the documentation lacking. One day it clicked, but I very nearly gave up on the whole platform. That said, the quality of the Android documentation has vastly improved since then. The training guides are excellent and the design section is good (although I much prefer the more practical Android Design in Action Youtube series).
- WWLink 13y agoLikewise, I got pretty good at it and love relative positioning (especially if you use it on a list). However, it is definitely a steep learning curve lol.
- schvenk 13y agoAny language gets rusty if you don't use it. It's like riding a bike. If I'd written this post two weeks after we started building for Android, that would be another thing.
- fredgrott 13y agothat is no longer and issue as the SMS/MMS api was just made public several months ago
- lvturner 13y agoI have a more off-topic (from Android/iOS) question, why did you decide to go with SMS/MMS, I understand that in theory it meant not having to build an infrastructure, and re-invent the wheel... but for me, as a customer the huge appeal is that other messaging apps free me from SMS and make use of my much cheaper data-plan. SMS is so limited and expensive compared to the amount of data I can send over 3G/Wifi, in fact, frequently sending messages on my phone is now free, but with one tied to SMS/MMS it would always cost me money to use. Maybe it's hindsight being 20/20, but it just seems like a really strange direction to go in, so is there something other than the infrastructure and theoretical ease of use that drove your decision?
- schvenk 13y agoInitially our target audience was US-centric, and cost isn't nearly as much of an issue for SMS/MMS in the US as it is elsewhere.