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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

The migration from Chrome to Firefox takes between 30 seconds and 30 minutes, depending on how much stuff you choose to move over, and has nothing to do with migrating code between two platforms. It's not a fair comparison unless you're talking about developing browser extensions, and even then the API is very close to being cross-platform[0].

I don't think most people are making a principled stand against the use of Google products, they're just instinctively performing a risk analysis.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

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But that's my point (which other people are making). There's a difference between Google APIs, products and software platforms. Some are riskier than not.

It adds little to the conversation if someone just says "scared of abandonment" without providing more context. Yes, one's entitled to that opinion, but it's slightly misplaced sentiment.

Out of interest, how long would it take for one to migrate from Go to say C or Java (if Go is killed)? Similarly, how long to go from some Google cloud service to either another provider or a different other service?

I agree with you about instinctively performing a risk analysis, but was offering a different perspective that perhaps one should separate Google into a few categories, then make judgement per category.

> Yes, one's entitled to that opinion, but it's slightly misplaced sentiment.

How do you figure? How long have you been using/developing with Google products?

Microsoft had the same reputation a few years ago. They learned the hard way what happens when you piss off developers. They are now making great strides to right those wrongs. What is Google doing to assuage those fears?

The way they have managed Android itself should give all mobile developers some consternation. It is an absolute mess with a ridiculous amount of cognitive overhead. Its a utility OS now and a really bad one at that.

My gut tells me that Android will be abandoned soon. Samsung could kill Android if it wanted to...

Google Maps: 5 years

Android: 3-4 years

GCP: <2 years

gRPC: 2 years (Kotlin, Python, Node, Rust, Scala)

From this and your other reply, you seem to have been burnt by something in Android. The mobile market for which I develop products is made up of over 80% Android. Whether Sundar Pichai decides to kill Android tomorrow or now, I'm not going to let that get in the way of me making a living from a platform that currently exists with a significant market share re. my target market.

Android APIs get partially rebooted at every Google IO, and the NDK is what it is, no need to add extra immature tooling into the mix, which isn't even officially endorsed by the Android team.

In that regard one is safer (CV) using Qt or Xamarin, given JavaScript, C++, C# and F#.

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