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Comment by ganlaw | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has been doing primarily Android engineering for the last 7 years. I am not surprised they are still hiring Android people. It is really hard to hire Android people. Every company I’ve worked (FANNG included) at struggled to fill Android roles. TikTok has reached out to me every month for the last year or so as well.

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I did a minuscule amount of app development for android back in the like 4.0 days, and recently tried again, using kotlin and jetpack or whatever their UI kit is. It was awful. Everything is so hard to use. Your UI framework requires you to define completely separate """magic""" functions to preview how it is rendered, as if that makes any sense. All documentation seems to make the classic blunder of assuming you already know the answer, already are an expert in the platform, and already know what you are doing. Every example either hides some magic that they had to add, or requires you already know everything that the example should be teaching you.

I literally feel like I understand the Windows Win32 dev ecosystem, and I've never written a Windows app in my life.

> It is really hard to hire Android people. Every company I’ve worked (FANNG included) at struggled to fill Android roles.

Why is that? Does iOS present similar hiring challenges?

Probably because anyone smart enough to work in tech is smart enough to have an iPhone instead of an Android

Lol at thinking that Apple is somehow more secure. You've bought the lie. I use Graphene.

is it really about security in the original comment though?

Then what is it about? The poster claims it's about intelligence so i don't see how else it could be.

Ah yes, you're part of the "exclusive club" of people who own an iPhone; they only added 200M members to their ranks last year. Only the smartest, tech Rockstars... or anyone with a piece of government issue id and enough credit to get a 2-year cell plan.

Maybe we're smart enough to want to be able to develop an app without having to use a mac, or easily push any app to our phone, etc.

I would actually argue the opposite. Any techie that loves to tinker on things will probably prefer an andriod phone over an apple one.

Really? I'd guess that, controlling for income, a larger proportion of tech workers use Android phones than the general population.

iOS's developers community had a head start - transitioning from Cocoa to Cocoa Touch is straightforward. Android didn't have this. Android SDK was a giant mess initially, there was no decent IDE for it initially, plenty of things that are `[something doThingWell]` in iOS are much harder in Android to implement.

Then there is fragmentation, availability of $50 devices that guaranteed to have issues with your app.

IMO iOS development is very pleasant (if you have someone other than you to deal with code signing) and Android isn't pleasant at all. Combine that with companies not caring about android apps... All of that contributes to a smaller number of good developers available.

> if you have someone other than you to deal with code signing

I hear that, though fastlane [0] makes like 1000x easier. Now my first step for any app is setting up a fastlane job to run Github Actions. My goal is to be able to push code and have an app show up in TestFlight without me ever needing to manually manage that. I can even make "blind" changes to the code and push it which is nice for old codebases or when I'm not on my main laptop but have access to my code.

[0] https://fastlane.tools/

It's been awhile, but I did both Android and iOS development for a product. iOS felt like a well thought out toolkit to build out very nice apps. Android was closer to here's a box of square legos, good luck. Getting to a polished app on Android was much harder [1].

Then there's the develop loop where the Android emulator is terrible, and the iOS simulator is great. So Android development meant constantly futzing with a device, which you really only want to have to do when you're ready really test.

[1] Games may be different since the game UI is often the same across platforms.

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