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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

From personal experience and from hearing 1st person stories of startups who went Android second, it takes at least 2x to even 3x the amount of time to build an Android app.

This is why when a very talented Android engineer like Sarah Haider (Twitter's Android lead) goes from Twitter to Secret, it is a big deal. There are many strong, capable iOS technical leads out there and probably a fraction thereof in Droidlandia (using Pareto's famous rule, probably 4 - 5 good iOS technical leads for every 1 good Android technical lead).

To make an app on Android look good, the responsibility lies much more on the developer than the designer. The designer on iOS can easily use IB. Not so much Android Studio or Eclipse.

At the highest levels (slightly below Jake Wharton), talented Android developers who care about the user experience and can deliver compelling, beautiful apps can name their own price.

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Eclipse is also HORRIBLE. Horrible, horrible horrible. Objective-C isn't exactly easy to understand, but Xcode is. I could functionally make things work in Xcode in 2 days having no experience with C or Objective C, I've probably spent 6 weeks in Eclipse in my life and I still couldn't really tell you how to do things. I have to re-learn it every time I want to do something, especially with the UI.

Give Android Studio a shot. Makes laying out the UI in XML a breeze with its excellent intellisense.

I've heard that, and that's fine - I appreciate the suggestion and will probably use it, but if that's actually the best then people will take Android dev more seriously when the best is the standard IDE. Right now Eclipse is the default and it blows.

Eclipse is the default for most Java development, but I know fairly few serious Java developers who use it. Some do, I'm not saying they don't exist, but IntelliJ--of which Android Studio is a fork--is generally the go-to tool amongst the experienced, skilled Java folks I know. Double for Scala. (I used nothing but IDEA for Android work at my last job, for about eighteen months - Eclipse is certainly not required and doesn't really make it easier.)

Second this. Not to say I'm an experienced Java developer, but after trying both, I'm sticking with IntelliJ, which was introduced to me by a Google SSE who definitely favored it over Eclipse.

I was wondering how IDEA compared to Eclipse for android dev, in large part because I'm interested in porting my app to Kotlin, if it's not too huge a jump. It's good to hear that it works well, despite not being the "official" default.

Android Studio is completely replicated within IDEA itself, so there's that too. We used a Maven build that worked really well within IDEA--it correctly wired up the Android facet and everything.

I don't know anything about Kotlin on Android, though.

Although I cannot compare to Eclipse. I'm a .NET Dev with an interest in Android. In fact I'm falling out with MS and sticking to that for a day job, but want to do Java / Android in my spare time. I've just completed the Courera programming Android course and I did the whole thing in IDEA community edition. I had no problems what so ever getting answers to any questions. I was relatively comfortable and productive within about 20 hours. I had no previous Java experience (although I'm a clean C# coder for over 6 years)

I was impressed with the tools you get out the box. I've paid hundred (close to thousands) for similar tools in .NET.

Actually "Eclipse is the default" is probably going to be false very soon. Every mid to senior level Android developer I know has migrated to Android Studio for months already. The advantages of Gradle and Studio are very apparent almost immediately.

Android Studio is the recommended IDE for any new projects. It's made by JetBrains, and it's 100x better.

I do not like Eclipse - it is clunky and often requires restarts to pick up changes or clear itself of confusion - and have never used Android Studio, but AFAICT the latter is still not the recommended editor according to the Android documentation - https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html says "If you're a new Android developer, we recommend you download the ADT Bundle to quickly start developing apps." The ADT bundle is Eclipse-based. On the Studio page it warns "Caution: ... you may encounter bugs" (though as I say, with Eclipse I'm also sure you'll encounter your fair share of bugs!)

> On the Studio page it warns "Caution: ... you may encounter bugs"

Android Studio only added Gradle, which provides Groovy for its scripting, recently. Groovy has a history of shipping standalone versions as soon as possible and letting users find the bugs, and only afterwards does Grails bundle the version. I'd say Gradle-bundled sits somewhere between standalone and Grails-bundled on the testing scale for Groovy versions.

It surely does. But why should I switch my build system? I'm a happy maven user. After all, only after AS came into picture I hear about the gradle non-sense. Gradle doesn't even use the proxy settings configured in AS (at least on Linux).

I can say the same for XCode — it's insanely horrible and completely unusable.

I suppose to each their own, but if anything except for the provisioning/plist stuff in Xcode is complicated to you, you must be used to something else because in and of itself xCode is phenomenal.

xCode (sic) is far from phenomenal. I have been writing iOS apps since 2008 and Mac apps longer than that and Xcode has made significant progress, but is still mediocre.

It's very telling that Jetbrains managed to pull AppCode out of nowhere and blitz Xcode. I had never before used an IntelliJ-based IDE, but within a week or two my productive increased severalfold. It really puts Apple's efforts to shame.

I'm a big IntelliJ fan and I can't roll with AppCode. I admire the work, but XCode feels a lot better for native code development. (I do work in C++ and only use Objective-C for tooling via Obj-C++, though.)

AppCode's C++ isn't quite there yet, I agree. Lately I'm also mostly using XCode because a huge chunk of my codebase is modern C++.

But for pure Obj-C apps I'll take AppCode every day. There are so many little usability and productivity wins over Xcode.

Congratulations on the most ridiculous comment on HN today. How many apps on the app store was that now, 1,000,000+ according to the admittedly non-authoritative Wikipedia. And all of them created with hex editors, you would have us believe. Not the completely unusable Xcode.

(a) opinions about things can vary among people

(b) people might suffer through substandard products because they're the only reasonable way of developing software for a platform (you see that sentiment a lot of times from people who claim to be forced to do development on Windows)

Just saying that a single person claiming that XCode is an unusable, horrible piece of shit probably says as much as 1 million apps being written for that platform. At least not about usability of the development environment.

I find Xcode pretty awful and instead use AppCode with Xcode open at the same time.

Xcode 5 finally makes it easy to run single unit tests. Before this, you had to create a schema to run a single test, which was several clicks and possibly some typing. Now it's click and run, which is lovely.

Eclipse (or Android Studio) is good for when you are getting your feet wet with Android. If you don't like using it there are alternatives.

I usually use Emacs or vi. The only thing I miss when not using Eclipse with the ADT plugin is after typing say "LinearLayout ll;" with Eclipse I can type Control-Shift-O and the LinearLayout class is automatically imported in the code. I miss this, but I kind of have this in Emacs with JDE - a Control-C-V-Z has similar behavior. I could probably do some more tool work on Emacs and make it even more automatic.

I do everything with emacs, vi, ant, astyle, adb, and the Android commands "android" and "monitor". Some people do Android in IntelliJ, some in Netbeans. Some use Sublime Text.

If you think Eclipse with ADT is bad for Android development now, you should have seen Eclipse/ADT at the end of 2009. Just getting the ADT plugin to work with Eclipse was a nightmare. Having seen the improvement since then, I guess it all seems less bad to me. Although I don't use Eclipse when I do Android programming, generally.

I'm pretty sure the idea is to get more GUI-based, not less. Telling a designer to use vi instead of Eclipse for UI is pretty hilarious.

Telling anybody to use vi at all is pretty hilarious.

I'm doing CoreOS based development at the moment and it only comes with vi. I've come across many other minimal linux environments where vi is the only option.

It's worth learning, even if you only learn the basics.

Perhaps you're already aware of Eclim, if not, check it out. Really useful for doing Android/Java in Vim.

My honest response: it's not the IDEs fault. By the way I had felt the same with XCode and I don't think I can blame XCode for this.

I code in MacVim. For anything, not just Android and I didn't like either Eclipse or XCode, XCode even lesser as mentioned above.

> To make an app on Android look good, the responsibility lies much more on the developer than the designer.

I would add that the designer has to understand Fragment, understand that density, orientation, screen size and text size are different dimensions of screen geometry, and how to avoid a combinatorial explosion of layouts, or, conversely, layouts that only work at default font sizes on medium denisty screens.

The coder has to get it right, too.

Absolutely. In a lot of ways, Android UI design is like designing for the web, in that you're designing rules for layout more than you're designing specific layouts.

Although I'd argue that that's really what designers should be doing anyway, thinking procedurally and in terms of systems rather than fixed, one-off designs.

"From personal experience and from hearing 1st person stories of startups who went Android second, it takes at least 2x to even 3x the amount of time to build an Android app." This differs from my experience. I've work on several large app projects (> 200 000 downloads), and the Android versions have been ready before or at the same time as their iOS counterparts.

Also, the good apps are not made using IB. Fine for prototyping, sure, but not suitable for real world use. Feel free to prove me wrong, and name IB success stories.

Smells like good old FUD spreading to me.

Saying good apps are not made using IB, and that its not suitable for real use, sounds like FUD to me too :)

Sure you need to leave IB sometimes (or a lot of the time - depending on the app), but if you are coding every little view by hand... well you have more time on your hands (and budget?) than I do :P

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