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Comment by worldsavior | Hacker News Reader

You also can't do Android (app) development outside Android Studio.

As others have stated it's possible, but might be cumbersome.

I made an example of an iOS/Android monorepo with a shared Rust core a few months ago: https://github.com/Antonito/bazel-app-core-native-example/

You do need the Android SDK to build, Android Studio makes things easier (even though the Bazel IDE plugin is a whole other topic itself..) but isn't mandatory to develop or run your app.

Are you sure about that? Flutter development for Android works great in VS Code/Codium. The Android extension [0] for VS Code has also worked fine in the past on a small Java-based App for me.

Android Studio is a probably the best IDE for this usecase but is not the only way.

[0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=adelphes...

That's just untrue on the face of it. All of the build tools are open and cross-platform. Is there a specific piece of Android Studio that you require for Android app development?

Not certain if this answers the question, but it seemed like you're generally expected to install Android Studio to get the correct build versions of all of the tools and libraries. I guess theoretically you could repackage them yourself, but also not entirely clear why you would—other than perhaps download size. The tools can be driven externally, once installed, but so could XCode projects (with `xcodebuild`).

This is not an expectation, no. Libraries are managed via Gradle or whatever build system you use. Android-specific host tools are Gradle-managed, installed via the sdkmanager tool, or managed via other means; I maintain a repository to install them via Nix [0], and many Linux distributions package them. The Android Studio IDE is not required, and doing so would pretty much break everyone's CI setup.

[0]: https://github.com/tadfisher/android-nixpkgs

They've always offered a bundle of the command line tools separately to Android Studio:

https://developer.android.com/studio#command-line-tools-only

Incorrect. You can (if you really want to) build an Android app without having any Google tools.

But even if you don't want to do any crazy stuff, Android SDK itself is just a bunch of Gradle scripts and Java apps. You can download and install them without any GUI in the way.

This is very common in CI/CD environments. Google provides a handy tool for that: https://developer.android.com/tools

Sorry, but Android and iOS are simply incomparable in their quality. Android SDK is a high-quality tool for developers that provides all the expected interfaces.

iOS SDK is a lock-in GUI hell that requires you to use a shitty macOS-only tool to even _upload_ apps to Apple Store. Never mind doing headless builds in CI/CD. Why that tool is shitty? It uses its own protocol for upload and doesn't do proper PMTU, so if you have a misconfigured MTU somewhere in the chain between you and Apple, uploads will just silently hang.

Edit: D'Oh, the correct URL for the sdkmanager is: https://developer.android.com/tools/sdkmanager

Just to nit pick a bit, that link is for Android Studio and downloads from the "Google for Developers" website, then instructs how to install and manage the the command line tools using the GUI

Not trying to argue but you can indeed pretty much completely avoid Xcode at this point. I’ve been doing it the past few weeks, including pushing to my phone and AppStore connect

On the contrary, commit your code to your GitHub repo, triggering Xcode cloud build to take it from there, build, test, deploy to TestFlight or store.

Found a bug while backpacking Sardinia? Edit the GitHub repo source on your phone, commit... hey, new build shipped.

See the App Store Connect mode: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

As I said, instead of providing tools, Apple locks you into a shitty GUI application. Thank you for giving another example.

> triggering Xcode cloud build

So my options are a 40gb compilation runtime, or a cloud build that bills me by the hour to avoid the 40gb compilation runtime.

You gotta hand it to Apple, any other audience would just call this "enshittification" and be done with it.

You can definitely avoid Xcode, what are you talking about?

No, you can't. You'll need to hit "xcodebuild" somewhere in the chain. It's just that you can offload it to someone else (e.g. EAS Build) or use pre-built apps that only need JS/LUA/Python code package swapped.

what? this is super easy with vim and gradle CLI

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