New ask Hacker News story: Why is Android Development so difficult/complex? (compared to Web and Desktop)
Why is Android Development so difficult/complex? (compared to Web and Desktop)
2 by pyeri | 0 comments on Hacker News.
This is as much a philosophical question as it's a pragmatic one. I've developed all kinds of apps in my life including Visual Basic GUI programs, Windows Forms Apps with Visual Studio, web apps using PHP and Flask, console scripts in bash, python, etc. In terms of layers of complexity, none of that experience even comes close to Android Development though. To be honest, even Swing GUI in Netbeans/Eclipse wasn't that byzantine! (in fairness, I hardly ever went beyond Hello World there). To begin with, we are absolutely married to the Android Studio IDE and even though developing a project without AS is theoretically possible, the number of hooves you must jump though are probably too many for the average programmer to comprehend. Honestly, I still don't know how exactly the actual APK/AAB is built or compiled! On other systems, compilation is a straightforward process like `gcc hello.c` or `javac Hello.java`, maybe a few extra parameters for classpath and jar libs for a GUI app but to be absolutely dependent on an IDE and gradle packaging system just to come up with a hello world APK? Don't you think there is an anti-pattern or at least some element of cruft here? I get that Android operating system itself is highly complex due to the very nature of a smartphone device, things like Activities and Services aren't as straightforward as GUI Forms. But the point is that Android programming doesn't have to be that complex! Don't you think so?
2 by pyeri | 0 comments on Hacker News.
This is as much a philosophical question as it's a pragmatic one. I've developed all kinds of apps in my life including Visual Basic GUI programs, Windows Forms Apps with Visual Studio, web apps using PHP and Flask, console scripts in bash, python, etc. In terms of layers of complexity, none of that experience even comes close to Android Development though. To be honest, even Swing GUI in Netbeans/Eclipse wasn't that byzantine! (in fairness, I hardly ever went beyond Hello World there). To begin with, we are absolutely married to the Android Studio IDE and even though developing a project without AS is theoretically possible, the number of hooves you must jump though are probably too many for the average programmer to comprehend. Honestly, I still don't know how exactly the actual APK/AAB is built or compiled! On other systems, compilation is a straightforward process like `gcc hello.c` or `javac Hello.java`, maybe a few extra parameters for classpath and jar libs for a GUI app but to be absolutely dependent on an IDE and gradle packaging system just to come up with a hello world APK? Don't you think there is an anti-pattern or at least some element of cruft here? I get that Android operating system itself is highly complex due to the very nature of a smartphone device, things like Activities and Services aren't as straightforward as GUI Forms. But the point is that Android programming doesn't have to be that complex! Don't you think so?
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