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Comment by Ologn | Hacker News Reader

I've been seeing these gloom and doom articles on Android since its launch. Nowadays at least they have to have the reality of the situation included - "A Murky Road Ahead for Android, Despite Market Dominance". "Android is now not just the globe’s most popular smartphone operating system, but the most popular operating system of any kind. More than a billion Android devices were sold in 2014". It doesn't seem so gloomy to me.

At least nowadays these Android gloom-and-doom articles have stopped saying that Microsoft is going to come out and crush Google in mobile. Microsoft's threat has been reduced to being involved in cloning what Google did - "One software start-up, Cyanogen, has raised about $100 million from several investors, including Google’s arch-competitor Microsoft, to sell phone makers an alternative user interface that works on top of Google’s Android."

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FWIW, there have been iPhone doom and gloom articles since its launch. Maybe it's just that doom and gloom articles get clicks?

I'm sure that's the reason. Doom and gloom headlines for any kind of platform or brand identity is perfect as clickbait because it sucks in both the opponents of that thing (due to schadenfreude purposes) and proponents of that thing (who want to see what is being said so they can refute it and be outraged by its wrongness).

"Apple Phones and Android Phones both pretty cool and here to stay for the foreseeable future." just ain't going to get clicked like any of these doom and gloom ones (in either direction) are.

I half expected the article to reference the Oracle Java API fiasco. That could definitely murky the waters for Android. This, at least, is pretty credible threat to Android.

I wish they'd replace Java stuff with something like Go , just get rid of Art/Dalvik . Java is very verbose and the xmls and build tools are all really hard work.

I am obviously being naive here. It probably can't be done

Earlier today there was a link to a talk about the state of Go. The link below shows that Go 1.5 is working on Android and experimental on iOS. What does "working" mean? No idea. I would bet that Google has been developing another development language for Android since a ruling in favor of Oracle would would be a huge financial burden for Google.

http://talks.golang.org/2015/state-of-go-may.slide#20

>What does "working" mean? That you can write JNI apps in Go. You can't access to almost any of the platform APIs that way, so it is really not intended at writing entire apps in Go. What it would allow you to do is to write something like a Rest library in Go and share it between the desktop, iOS (depending on the state of Go on that platform) and Android apps.

Go is still garbage collected. Supporting Objective C, Lua or even Rust would be more meaningful in terms of improving performance.

You should have a look at Kotlin. It removes almost all of Java's verbosity and the best part is that you can already write Android apps in Kotlin since the compiler emits java's bytecode.

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