Comment by binarycheese | Hacker News Reader

Comment by binarycheese | Hacker News Reader

Google thinks they can have lightning hit the same spot twice .i.e. crowd sourcing. It worked with Google Search but for the Android platform, Google will have to actually do some PR work. As an android developer, I got pretty frustrated by the lack of clear documentation and their horrible API. Chances are, if you are used to the Sun Java API (or even C# API), trying to develop in Android will easily get your frustrated with the Android API. Method names sound alien or don't really mean what they imply. Also, the whole XML resourced-based format prevents you from easily creating components dynamically (through java code) and referencing them in more than one project.

I could go on and on...

Even the Developer portal on the Android Market is just horrible. I'm not sure what they were trying to accomplish.

- 2 screen shots???

- extremely limited description?

- No clear text box for "Update Reason"?

- You can't respond to user ridiculous comments?

- Sometimes my paid apps get cancelled after two days of purchase

P/S: I have more than 1/2 million combined downloads

Ok this is just wrong on so many levels.

It's trivial to create interface elements on the fly, even when using XML resources. You're not under any obligation to even define things using XML if you don't want to (and some more dynamic apps don't).

There are some issues with the way things are named (a spinner is not what you think it is), it's really a pretty small issue. I find the API's to be fairly well documented and fairly straightforward. A large amount of the standard Java library is available as well.

The app-store is a complete and utter mess and I think Google knows it. I fully expect them to address it in their next release (I hope).

You obviously don't develop large/similar applications do you?

We have custom controls (text boxes, listviews, dynamic formviews) that inherit from Android controls, that are reused over 15+ applications. It was hell building them scratch because the main app was a Java library (not an android app so the XML resources are useless).

I don't think you even understand what I'm saying. For example: Can you explain to me why the CheckedTextView control is available in XML but the class itself is abstract?

I'm not even an experienced Android developer, but I just looked up CheckedTextView:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/Checke...

I see no indications that it's abstract, and I found a bunch of other abstract classes that clearly say "abstract" above the class name at the top of the page. Am I totally off base here?

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