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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Almost every release of Android Studio has succeeded in breaking every single Android app I wrote. I have always had to cut and paste every class, resource, layout, one by one into a new project in order to get it to compile. I always fear pressing the "update" button.

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What kind of ridiculous project structure do you have? I have never in my ~5 or so years of using Android Studio have had to do something as drastic as that.

I have occasionally have had issues with updating, but this has required a tweak in the gradle file and an update of build tools, at most.

My experience (full-time Android dev) falls somewhat in the middle.

This sort of compatibility breaking was fairly common back in the AS 1.X/early 2.X days. As of now, it's really rare, and usually resolves automatically.

> What kind of ridiculous project structure do you have?

Obviously one that was supported in every preceding version of Android Studio. When making consumer-facing tools, it is the job of the tool maker to make sure that it doesn't break.

If something works in a version, and breaks in another, guess who is to be blamed? (hint: not the user)

Let's see, I just upgraded to Android Studio 3.1, opened one of my previous ridiculously simple apps, and voila:

    Could not find com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.0.1.
    Searched in the following locations:
        https://jcenter.bintray.com/com/android/tools/build/gradle/3.0.1/gradle-3.0.1.pom
        https://jcenter.bintray.com/com/android/tools/build/gradle/3.0.1/gradle-3.0.1.jar
    Required by:
        project :
    Add Google Maven repository and sync project
    Open File

Okay, I hit the "Add Google Maven repository and sync project", and now we have:

    Could not GET 'https://jcenter.bintray.com/org/ow2/asm/asm/5.1/asm-5.1.pom'. Received status code 502 from server: Bad Gateway
    Enable Gradle 'offline mode' and sync project

I don't know what the hell any of this means -- I'm not a Java/Gradle/etc. person at all, just forced to use this pile of mess for Android -- so I cluelessly hit "Enable Gradle 'offline mode' and sync project" hoping it will resolve the error, and now:

    No cached version of org.ow2.asm:asm:5.1 available for offline mode.
    Disable Gradle 'offline mode' and sync project

Created a new project and it compiled successfully. Cut-and-paste classes, here we come!

On another note, creating a blank Android app results in nothing short of 87 files. Does it really have to be this complicated? Do we really have to use this gradle nonsense? (90%+ of the errors I get hen upgrading Android Studio say something about gradle). Most frameworks on other platforms are simple and elegant enough that it is possible to memorize the minimal "hello world" example and implement it with vim, and the IDE is just there for convenience, not out of necessity.

Bintray is having major outages today. That explains the 502

Okay. That's almost crazy. In my almost 3 years of maintaining our app that was originally written in Eclipse, we never had to face any single issues like this. There were some minor issues but never like this. It makes me wonder if the your project structure or the way project is written is crappy.

Well, just spend some time reading Android developer forums on Reddit, G+ or Google groups, every time there are new SDK or Studio stable releases.

The dheera is not alone.

Well, the rule of thumb is that if you need stability, never upgrade on the first day of release but rather wait for 1 week or two. I personally have faced and upgraded my apps through many of these upgrades and there was rarely an earth-shattering issue that I was not able to solve. YMMV.

Well, yes, it always happens to someone - I mean, every upgrade will break some stuff for some devs. After all, the userbase of Android Studio is quite sizeable.

What I find hard to believe is that these problems would hit the same bunch of people every time, and on the top of it, affecting every project they work on. Come on.

And this is what dheera claimed ("almost every release of Android Studio has succeeded in breaking every single Android app"). If it's really so extreme, I'd say that he - or she - is not unlikely to be alone, or close to that.

The crazy part is, while I have the same issues with every release of Android Studio – the same project in IDEA works just fine, without any trouble, ever.

In fact, JetBrains quality and reliability has been much higher than the piece of shit IDE Google has been producing.

That is baffling, and probably down to your setup somehow. What exactly prevents it from compiling?

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