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Comment by lawgimenez | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works with both Android Studio and Xcode, I could say AS is lightyears ahead of Xcode.

Gemini on AS is so good and most of the time accurate and adopts to how you name your variables and functions. Xcode 16 on the other hand, what a shitshow.

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I work in both too and will take Xcode any day of the week over AS. It has plenty of downsides but it's fast and surfaces errors well. YMMV.

Agreed, every time I open AS to update my company's Android apps (infrequently) I have to spend an hour Googling odd Java memory errors and grade sync complaints before I can do the minor tweaks I need to do to the actual app.

Also prefer Xcode. As long as you stay away from XIBs and Storyboards it’s more responsive than Android Studio.

And yeah, if you let a project lapse on gradle and library updates for any length of time at all be prepared for a fight to get it all brought back up to speed. Swift Package Manager is generally less of a headache.

Some of AS’ “smart” features are also more of a hindrance than a help at times, and don’t even get me started on ProGuard (which has no Apple ecosystem equivalent).

Sounds to me that your Android codebase is a Frankenstein of a codebase.

Also. That said, autocomplete outside of Xcode is way more accurate. The latest beta predictive code is even worse than what we had… hallucinates APIs for the most vanilla of Foundation calls. Half my reflexive autocompletes now turn into — wtf I accepted this junk AI idea?

With the exception of the instruments features, Xcode’s poor refactoring features, needless animations, bad code navigation, lack of a terminal, and limited plugin support make it such a drag to use. AppCode was better in almost every regard but was discontinued.

My biggest problem with Xcode is that it really only works for Swift, while the Jetbrains stuff (incl. Android Studio) works well for a lot of languages.

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