I have to say it's such a giant bloated thing that it really does not make me want to write native code.
Fortunately, there is a lot of great stuff going on with Progressive Web Apps now. I hope that they will be the future. Developing for the browser is so much leaner.
Man .. don't even get me started .. ok, here we go:
I can use it instantly.
I can remove it instantly.
The sandboxing is much better.
The privacy is much better.
I can link to it from wherever I like.
I can use it on all my devices.
I can copy text and images.
I can change the style (I often enlarge the font for example).
It can not use my battery / camera / phone when it's closed.
...
I feel like I can go on forever.
This is on a Nexus 5X, using stock Android.
Web apps are a complete joke right now. Entirely useless. I always install native apps, if available — even if I know I’ll uninstall it 5 minutes later — because the alternative is entirely unusable on my device.
I've never had a browser crash a phone, but having the phone start to immediately feel sluggish after opening something like a moderately sized GitHub pull request--that's certainly a thing.
However making it more difficult to crash the device is a definite advantage, you're right about that. Although I very rarely have native apps crash my devices anyways. I can't remember a time it's happened on my phone, and on my desktop it's usually a device driver issue combined with a game that causes an issue. Definitely an edge case and not something I encounter with native applications in general.
If I open a site like cnn.com without an adblocker, all apps running in background (even e.g. spotify if I'm listening to music) are force closed because the phone runs low on RAM.
Every website or web app I've used so far has used > 100-200M RAM, while a well developed Android app stays below 20-50M.
My phone has 2GB RAM, 1GB is used by the OS, 500-800M are used by Google Play Services, and a web browser with 1-2 tabs takes another 200M of RAM.
As soon as I open a website any more complex than HN, everything feels sluggish.
On the other hand, JavaScript in a more constrained environment--React Native, for example--is a lot more reasonable. Still heavier than an Android app, but not so heavy that it kills processes except on very downmarket phones.
I think the answer is some apps are better on web, others on native.
Videos / Music / Games / Email / Messaging are better native. For actual reading of content (HN / Reddit / Twitter / Facebook ...etc) I find better on the web.
It’s pretty
It’s fast
It’s not stuttery-stoppy
I can swipe back and forth between pages without waiting 4 seconds for everything to display, and then inevitably move around right before I fucking tap
It’s on the app store
I can use it instantly.
I can remove it instantly.
I don’t know what sandboxing is
I don’t care about privacy
There are convenient share buttons
I can use it on the single device I use regularly
I can screenshot it
I can unfortunately change the style by updating
It can use my battery when it’s closed? Wait wha-
ooh notification
...
I’m gonna go use facebook now like a normal person, later nerds
Some kinds of things are just a better fit for the web.
In what way? How?
Browser-based has the fast reload thing going for but it's not in the same universe as lean for a modern development stack, not in terms of RAM usage nor size on disk. So can you elaborate on this "bloated" vs. "lean"?
Why?
You can write (and compile, and test) native code without ever touching Android Studio. I would think any like/hate of IntelliJ (Android Studio) should have no bearing on whether you choose to write native Android code or not.
It would be like saying, "CLion is such a giant bloated thing that I never want to write C++ code". Or "RubyMine is so giant and bloated, I never want to touch Ruby on Rails again".
What would you say, for example, if someone told you they didn't want to write a Progressive Web App because they really disliked Atom and Visual Studio Code?
and that's very often if you are a Java/Android dev. Even features like auto complete (let alone with prediction) is very hard to get right elsewhere, let's say, somewhere like Vim. Not just the language, there's Android SDK itself and other libraries. But, if you count "not needing auto complete etc" as part of "know the language well enough" or that they trivial enough then, well, I rest my case.
I wrote substantial systems before there were any Java IDEs. Nothing hard about it. Write a lot of code and it's easy. If that disturbs you I'm sorry, but you should allow that there are people with more skill than perhaps you've been exposed to.
I used to write in Vim (C) when I worked for that South Korean giant. After that I moved to Java/Android and I wouldn't get back to those days of Vim/C for anything. So I think it comes down to choice. The thing is GP commenter mentioned "masochism" and now I see the point.
Giant? It's smaller than Xcode you know :)
Bloated? Yes, so bloated! As an Android developer this is my biggest complaint from the ecosystem after the fragmentation though Google is trying to fix that with Treble but they are just not enough for the Studio. It was amazingly frustrating and pathetic to work with it couple of years back and it still is.
My entire team is stuck on old Android Studio versions. I was the only one trying to live on the edge (and by that I mean stable channel) but for past few months I have just stopped upgrading Studio. It never fails to break the entire damn setup upon any upgrade. Like any release!
- Stable releases of Android Studio are usually followed by complaints of breaking left and right even though they take mounths to get out
- Stable releases of Android Support Library usually always have a couple of regressions
- Documentation and release notes always gets made available a couple of hours later
- Kotlin plugin usually breaks at every release
- NDK gets the attention level of a 20% project
Supported by VSCode and IntelliJ community edition. Hot reload is the cat's PJs.