Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

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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

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.

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

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.

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