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Comment by dannyr | Hacker News Reader

Android Studio/IntelliJ is an excellent IDE. Kotlin is a great language. There's Instant Run for quick builds.

I've only been doing Android for 9 years. I've seen the development tools evolve and improved the past few years.

But what do I know. You're probably the expert here.

Android Studio/IntelliJ may be excellent to you, and I'd agree the IDE is better than XCode as far as slinging code into an editor is concerned. However the Android development system isn't just the IDE: it's the build process, integration with debugging tools, and the APIs. Java doesn't have to be a bloated mess of over-engineered cruft. I've seen wonderful, clean Java. Android development is the opposite of that.

Kotlin may be great. I haven't used it much, but so far I'm finding it can't hide Android's bloated, over-engineered substructure.

The build process is significantly better in Android world once you actually take a look at how the build process works and need to start doing automated testing and deployment. Xcode tools for actual continious development beyond manual clicking are horrendous and waste a huge amount of people hours.

There's third party solution for iOS build automation - https://fastlane.tools. I didn't tried the whole end-to-end solution, but pieces I tried worked very well.

We used that, but sadly it doesn't help with CI, constant simulator / connected device issues and breakages in toolchains when Apple releases new Xcode :(

Unfortunately, the support for managing code-signing in Fastlane isn't quite fully-baked, and it can get messy. It's still really useful, though, if you have to deal with iOS builds.

> There's Instant Run for quick builds.

Instant Run was buggy and made builds a lot slower, ironically the last time I tried it. That was after them saying that they fixed a bunch of issues so we should give it another chance.

I've been doing Android since 1.0 and started with iOS/Swift half year ago. I think the iOS platform is nicer, simpler, more thought out and overall a better experience, but not by a huge margin. Haven't used Kotlin yet though.

One area where iOS sucks is creating and (sometimes) working with UI.

> But what do I know. You're probably the expert here.

Was it really necessary?

I think it's warranted - the OP wrote an insultingly dismissive post with claims which are downright wrong.

It would be fine if he only criticised the newbie experience (where he's very right), but he also decided to add a bunch of wrong things in there.

I disagree; I think it made the response be entirely condescending and removed any point they had.

For what it's worth, I have about as much experience as they do, and I disagree with them. While the tools have improved, they still have a long way to go.

Maybe that says more about how smart you are than how good the Android ecosystem is.

And? Without fail, whenever there is a post about Android on HN there'll be someone who miserably regales their tourist experience with Android. But that has zero professional relevance to anyone doing anything with any intention or focus at all. Actually it's worse than zero relevance, and is simply misleading noise.

Somehow many of us manage quite fine, and enjoy the experience.

In every other realm that sort of drive-by shooting gets rightly criticized. "Tried Rust -- => everywhere. Lame". "Tried vi. Couldn't quit. Garbage."

Sure, if the only tangible thing that the parent poster said wasn't that he's been on the platform for 9 years. The brain's an amazing thing - it can get used to almost anything, given enough time!

Congrats on making it 9 years. I've only been doing mobile development for 2 years, and using React Native for most of it. So I have an opinion that may be less biased toward a certain toolset.

I'd compare developing on Android very unfavorably to iOS. All the points the OP made are accurate, in my experience. Every time I needed to dive into Android native code, Layout Inflation, etc, I find it to be a crufty and unpleasant system. And gradle is really a pain to use - tons of edge cases and unhelpful error messages. Add to that, you need to support like ten thousand devices, many of which are running Android 4.4 (which, IIRC, is like three years old) and have a WIDE range of screen sizes.

Compare that to iOS development, and the differences seem obvious and apparent to me.

> Add to that, you need to support like ten thousand devices, many of which are running Android 4.4 (which, IIRC, is like three years old) and have a WIDE range of screen sizes.

I've been developing Android apps for years (before support lib even existed, much less all the fancy new kids) and range of screen sizes has literally never once been an actual issue. Use 'dp' instead of 'px' and you pretty much never have a screen diversity problem. All the platform views & layouts handle the majority of the work.

Does React Native make this more complicated for some reason?

Same experience here. The API is the same, so what exactly is the problem? There's an occasional device-specific bug, but I usually don't spend much time on those.

Device support is a nightmare from a game development perspective if you're coding in C++ and using the GPU directly. Figuring out why the black box shader compiler is crashing on a particular device is not fun.

Perhaps screen sizes was a bad example of fragmentation (though, because the range is so much wider than on iOS, keyboard avoiding stuff can be unpleasant). Better examples would be subtle device-specific bugs. Like, off the top of my head, touch handling being handled differently for views on the Galaxy S5, making side swiping impossible. I can't confirm if that's RN specific or not, but I do know that I spent tens of hours on Android specific bugs that just were not present on iOS.

And perhaps RN was the culprit for some of these things. But definitely not all.

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