Fuck You Android Framework (2018)
medium.com
medium.com
Oh wait...
No one is forcing you to pick up a full Angular 2.0+RxJs stack
I've never been allowed to pick the crap I have to maintain.
As apps' needs and the community of programmers gave grown, we have developed abstractions to make hard things easy. For example, you can build APIs in the language of your choice, often in a few lines of code. What is simpler than a Flask app?
IMO, there are a lot of poor complaints here but this one takes the cake. What could possibly be done to prevent people from being able to decompile apks? Should anything be done? This strikes me as the antithesis of software freedom.
Android framework is a dancing bear. What is remarkable is not how well it dances, but that it can be made to dance at all.
This is not to excuse Alphabet, who are entirely well-enough equipped to make something actually good, if they could be bothered.
Are they though? What's a good developer thing that came from google and is not a niche blackbox?
I don't think it's too hard for Google to build a better SDK, if they really wanted to. I think it's hard to get users to adopt it, despite its benefits.
Flutter represents a great opportunity imho to uplift development capability and avoid needless fragmentation. It reminds me of Adobe's Flex in some ways and I can assure you that I have _never_ had such a productive client-side development environment since! Flex united developers, graphic designers, animators etc. 3 second build times...worked on everything even if the runtime was cough 'sketchy'. I'd love to see Chet Haase move onto Flutter and resume similar videos to his Adobe days.
As for all of the Kotlin noise, like much of Android this is "movement not progress" and yet another example of fragmentation. I certainly like many aspects of Kotlin _but_ Java 14 is very nice AND enables greater participation from different roles (e.g. lower barrier to entry for the Spring Boot camp). I'd love to see Google uplifting the Java / JVM community and support modern Java syntax on Android.
As for Google building a better SDK, clearly the Android and Flutter teams do not see eye to eye...but maybe there will be lessons learned for both. I will be keeping an eye on Fuchsia with respect to developer tooling.
There is no job security in mobile apps.
I frequently find myself wishing I could write Android apps with Swift and UIKit. They have their own warts, but the majority of difficulties you’ll face with them involve more advanced/less used SDKs… its base UI components work very well and mostly act as one would expect them to, especially with the improvements to UICollectionView/UITableView brought in iOS 13. Way fewer surprise NullPointerExceptions too thanks to Swift being a much cleaner break from Objective-C than Kotlin is from Java.
He's correct of course.
And it's great to know I'm not alone (we need to start a club methinks).
I'm asking OP as well as anyone else who wishes to comment.
Angular 8 is over engineered, there are a million pieces that make the app work; any of which can and do break. With the code freeze by EOD, you're trying out different compiler options just so you can get the console error to stop and pass the build. There's this unfathomable love for typescript that is designed to dumbify the js dev population. For config, There's angular.json, tsconfig.json, webpack-config.json, tsconfig-app.json and package.json to start with.
There's @component, @inject, @injectable. And you also have to know @component inherits @directive.
And while you're ramping up with this don't forget ngc and ng-packgr. Check ng-cli version before compiling.
And yeah, do this before the next angular release, which is in next month.
And it's not that I have thin skin. I find web development pretty nice and have no qualms about all of the js libraries.
It's just not fun, you know? Apps should be fun to make.
It's amazing how many bad UI patterns get replicated through the years by teams with little experience or who don't use their own frameworks.
Also - it's a hard problem.
And yet still so relevant today.