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Comment by sumukh1 | Hacker News Reader

As the post mentioned, game developers aren't really interested in the platform. As a result, they file less Radar reports and Gamekit continues to be buggy. I'd really like to see Apple up the ease-of-use of Radar (or something new).

It's becoming a trend that iOS devs are forced to struggle with the ecosystem, but like I've been saying, from my experience the revenues are strongly tilted in favor of iOS. While we complain about certain aspects of iOS, on a whole, (at least from anecdotal evidence) it's still better than the problems that other platforms face.

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That may be true today but in a business that moves this fast you have skate ahead of the puck. And the quality of the engineering I'm seeing on Google's side in the last few releases of Android impresses me a lot more than anything I've seen come from Apple since iOS4.

My hunch is the sheer volume of Android sales and Google's engineering edge is going to turn the tide but external factors could trump all.

What engineering are you impressed with on Google's side? I'd love to see examples of things to help me erase my painful memories of developing on Android around 1.5/1.6/2.1.

Fragments and the ActionBar. The new holo styles and interface conventions. The flexibility of layouts and the way that activities work. There are some rough edges, to be sure, but it all seems a lot more forward looking than Apple's miniaturization of Cocoa.

Also the new interactive notifications in Jelly Bean are an idea that's long overdue. I think the ability of Android apps to integrate more deeply with the OS is really starting to pay off.

  > The flexibility of layouts

And yet somehow iOS6 Auto Layouts and Collection Views do not count? Interesting. I also expect Pass Kit to take off.

These both feel like hacks and since Apple can't ever be bothered to backport anything I can't use them until my clients are willing to commit to iOS 6-only releases. Thanks to the maps fiasco I don't see that happening until some time next year.

I agree that the flexible layout approach is pretty nice (and obviously we're seeing Apple move towards this direction with autolayout), but I'm not a big fan of the fragment API. They sounded better in theory than they've worked out in practice, IMO.

The inability to nest fragments in other fragments makes doing certain things like fragment based tabs or viewpagers rather awkward. And since the fragment lifecycle almost but doesn't quite match up with the activity lifecycle, some extra careful bookkeeping is required to make sure state is transferred properly upon rotation since the entire thing gets destroyed and recreated.

Anyway, the biggest problem for me on Android is that although the new APIs in 3.0 and 4.0 are pretty sweet, I can't use most of them due to having to maintain compatibility back to 2.2 (Froyo). ActionBarSherlock and the compatibility library help a bit, but it's not quite the same.

Which APIs specifically are you missing that aren't in the compat libraries? I agree that Google should be putting in more effort here and not leaving it up to a third party to come up with a backported action bar implementation but so far I've had pretty good luck with the compat libs.

I also agree that there are some rough edges in the fragments API but it's nothing like the mess that view controller containment is on iOS.

It's very scary to rely on something like GameKit that is unproven because all your bugs are showstoppers, and you need to wait on Apple to fix it. And it's not like you can escalate iOS bugs against Apple...

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