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Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

• m_kos 2y ago
  Android devs, are there any good places online where experienced and friendly devs answer questions? (I need some handholding and the advice I got from Reddit usually turned out not quite right.)
• leros 2y ago
  I think you're just going through the learning curve of something new. You could make the same argument about a React/Next app being unnecessarily complicated with Hello World.
  • yen223 2y ago
    I loathe to say this, because I still have a soft spot for the language, but you could say the same thing about Python development in 2024
    • 3np 2y ago
      > Do you want to break your Linux installation or rearchitecure your runtime? [Y] (But really, Android dev is a qualitatively different level of fucked up compared to React or any major Python framework I can think of. React Native, though...)
  • ivm 2y ago
    As someone who moved from pure iOS development to cross-platform iOS+Android development in C# with native UIs – big nope! Android development is a mess, it takes at least twice as long to build exactly the same UIs as on iOS, and there are endless edge cases between versions and also hostile API, such as not allowing a developer to know when a software keyboard appears/disappears. It was especially frustrating at the start, but has not become much easier with experience.
• samoit 2y ago
  I also agree that the development experience is awful. I have more than 10 years as an Android developer and Android Studio (someone remember when it was derived from Eclipse?) is painfully slow, even in modern machines. Just starting a new project is a ridiculously sluggish process. Also Gradle is a piece of hyper-complicated software that (almost) nobody is interested in, but it is there and you have to deal with it. Nowadays I am basically moving to Flutter, much more simpler and easier than kotlin.
  • muzani 2y ago
    Most of my stack overflow points are from helping people run their build in Eclipse :) Gradle is deprecated now though. And Jetpack Compose is about as convenient as Flutter.
    • hasbot 2y ago
      Gradle replaced Maven which replaced ant which replaced make. The tech treadmill was one of the reasons I retired early and I'm glad I did. What is the new hotness replacing Gradle?
      • muzani 2y ago
        Kotlin DSL https://developer.android.com/build/migrate-to-kotlin-dsl https://developer.android.com/build/migrate-to-kotlin-dsl This one makes sense, though the improvement is minor.
        • lmz 2y ago
          That's still Gradle. Just a different language to configure it.
          • muzani 2y ago
            Eh, thanks for the correction. I originally read it as Groovy. Unfortunately, I can't edit or delete my original comment, but feel free to downvote it.
• brudgers 2y ago
  Phones are optimized to handle RF. My engineering advice is to build your application with that in mind. A wireless webcam is the simplest thing that might work. Hosting a video stream on other hardware might be the second simplest thing. Good luck.
  • LordShredda 2y ago
    Except, phones have exceptional cameras. You'd be spending just as much on a dedicated camera
    • brudgers 2y ago
      I remember reading “wired USB webcam” in the question, but maybe I misunderstood.
• b20000 2y ago
  welcome to real software development
• worstspotgain 2y ago
  Android is an example of technical debt from poor caked-in design. Its problems are still stemming from being rushed to market (relatively speaking) two decades ago. It's had enormous success as the most viable iOS alternative, but at a cost. On the flip side, consider PalmOS. It was SotA at its debut in 1996. In the early aughts, Palm made Treo smartphones when almost no one knew what a smartphone was. It had a multiyear lead, yet it got easily marginalized by iOS and Android. Its technical debt was from maintaining backward compatibility with 90's apps, and cost it dearly. To be fair, company management sucked too. The moral is: caked-in issues suck, but if you're going all in with a design, the most important thing is to time it with the explosion of the market. Palm was too early, others like Maemo and Windows Phone were too late.
  • muzani 2y ago
    Dart and Flutter were actually meant to be the better design. Lots of features from those were replicated on Kotlin-Jetpack, especially Compose. And lots of those features end up being copied to Java. Dart-Flutter still supports them better natively though, instead of having to hack things like reactive programming via Kotlin Flow.
    • rstat1 2y ago
      Flutter is at best no different IMO, as now not only do you have to deal with Flutter's build system for Dart, you also have to deal with Kotlin/the default Android build system when you want to do something not supported by the Flutter std libs, which last I tried was quite a lot. That was a few years back though so maybe its changed (though I doubt it). Jetpack Compose is similar in its "not much better"-ness to me. I can't remember if it was Compose or Flutter, where I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get something to stay centered on the screen regardless of orientation. Something that I could do pretty easily and quickly with my own UI tech library in C++. However I can't use that code without having to jump through all the annoying hoops you have to jump through with JNI crap in order to use it. So I just don't bother with Android anymore.
      • cageface 2y ago
• aristofun 2y ago
  Android is a piece of sh.. from developer perspective (and arguably from a user one). Known fact, take it or leave it :) To be fair UI development can not be simple in itself. Because of the exponentially growing state machine => simple Rails style general purpose frameworks are impossible, it will always be a challenging problem.
• muzani 2y ago
  I've been developing Android since 2012. It was worse then. Still sucks now but isn't as bad. Esoteric errors are still the norm. With 10 years of experience you only have to swear a whole day when updating a library, instead of spending a week. GPT does poorly with beginners - it's definitely something humans have advantage with AI and I expect the gap to get bigger. I do not touch legacy projects anymore because they're always horribly broken, half the libraries no longer exist. Many of them are easier to rewrite than fix. You get weird bugs where A needs to be 1.71.0 but B needs A at 1.69.0 or 2+. Upgrading A to 2.0.1 will fix A and B but break CDEFG. Upgrading everything to max breaks switch-case, turns some of your brackets to lambdas, requires you to change your UI from XML to Kotlin, etc, etc. If you want something to hack stuff with, I made this: https://github.com/smuzani/android-minimalist-template https://github.com/smuzani/android-minimalist-template Originally it was designed for AI with smaller context windows. But it works as a simplified version of our production codebase. The principle behind this is that you should have good peripheral vision and that the shape of the code resembles what it's trying to build.
  • jfengel 2y ago
    Oh, are GUIs not XML any more? Good. I am a programmer. Don't make me learn yet another language with no debugging tools. Just write the UI in the same language as the rest of my work. (I look in on Android every few years, but I haven't done any real work in it.)
    • muzani 2y ago
      Haven't used XML for them in over 2 years (excluding replacing legacy code and fixing typos). They went deep into XML+data binding which people liked for a while, because you could do UI tests without building the whole UI and such. But it wasn't so good in production because building everything from XML was making build times long. So while you could test that it's outputting the correct UI content within 2 minutes instead of 12, it also meant assert(1+1==2) took 2 minutes too. I believe deprecating kapt now also breaks data binding, though I don't know if it breaks all the other basic XML layout stuff.
  • Vanit 2y ago
• ffhhj 2y ago
  Android Studio isn't that bad, but their design system is horrible. After years dealing with that crap I ended creating my own WebView wrapper and moved all the design and logic to HTML5, which I write by hand, never been a fan of frameworks. Even created a WASM obfuscator with Python, and my apps autoupdate without relying on Google Play, by dowloading a compressed package. Whenever these are taken down I just set a flag/link in the DB and the app will instruct the user to get the re-published app. Sadly the golden age of the app store is long gone. I used to make thousands monthly around 2015 with silly apps, but all went down the drain by 2018. Making apps isn't worth anymore.
• ycombinatrix 2y ago
  Android app development is awful but compiling native binaries/libraries is not that bad ime. Super easy in Rust.
• John23832 2y ago
  You should try iOS dev.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • throwup238 2y ago
    That’s like saying “may you live in interesting times.” Sounds fun at first, but it always ends in tears.
    • nvahalik 2y ago
      Where does that quote come from? I have been saying it for years but I have lost the source!
      • throwup238 2y ago
        It’s an apocryphal Chinese curse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_...
      • 3np 2y ago
        The phrase "may you live in interesting times" is the lowest in a trilogy of Chinese curses that continue "may you come to the attention of those in authority" and finish with "may the gods give you everything you ask for." I have no idea about its authenticity.
      • ordu 2y ago
        I read it first in the "Interesting Times" by Terry Pratchett. I don't know did he invented this phrase or borrowed it somewhere.
  • lawgimenez 2y ago
    It's amazing Apple hasn't fixed the bug where switching branches will break an Xcode build. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78244976/package-resolved-gets-deleted-on-branch-switching https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78244976/package-resolve...
• chillfox 2y ago
  Android development is definitely insane. Just the process for getting a dev environment setup is stupidly complicated compared to almost anything else.
  • mtnGoat 2y ago
    So… similar to setting up a dev environment at most FAANGs? ;)
• westurner 2y ago
  /? termux USB webcam: https://www.google.com/search?q=termux+usb+webcam https://www.google.com/search?q=termux+usb+webcam Termux was F-droid only, but 4 years later is back on the Play Store: https://github.com/termux-play-store#current-status-for-users https://github.com/termux-play-store#current-status-for-user... Termux has both glibc and musl libc. Android has bionic libc. One time I got JupyterLab to run on Android in termux with `proot` and pip. And then the mobile UI needed work in a WebView app or just a browser tab t. Maybe things would port back from Colab to JupyterLab. conda-forge and Linux arm64 packages don't work on arm64 Android devices, so the only option is to install the *-dev dependencies and wait for compilation to finish on the Android device. Waydroid is one way to work with Android APKs in a guest container on a Linux host. That Android Studio doesn't work on Android or ChromiumOS without containers (that students can't have either).
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    When you get x on turmux working you see what mobile development could have been and weep for the fallen world we live in.
    • westurner 2y ago
      containers/podman > [Feature]: Android support: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/17717 https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/17717 : > There are docker and containerd in termux-packages. https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/root-packages/docker https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/root-p... But Android 13+ supports rootless pKVM VMs, which podman-machine should be able to run containers in; (but only APK-installed binaries are blessed with the necessary extended filesystem attributes to exec on Android 4.4+ with SELinux in enforcing mode.) - Android pKVM: https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architecture https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architec... : > qemu + pKVM + podman-machine: > The protected kernel-based virtual machine (pKVM) is built upon the Linux KVM hypervisor, which has been extended with the ability to restrict access to the payloads running in guest virtual machines marked ‘protected’ at the time of creation. > KVM/arm64 supports different execution modes depending on the availability of certain CPU features, namely, the Virtualization Host Extensions (VHE) (ARMv8.1 and later). - "Android 13 virtualization lets [Pixel >= 6] run Windows 11, Linux distributions" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30328692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30328692 It's faster to keep a minimal container hosting VM updated. So, podman-machine for Android in Termux might help solve for development UX on Android (and e.g. Android Studio on Android). podman-machine: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-machine.1.html https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-machine.1.h...
• sgammon 2y ago
  Kotlin is a dream. I literally love writing it.
  • brutus1213 2y ago
    Back when I was in undergrad, I recall how I was taught C. Just read one of the bible books on a weekend, and was ready to go. I was recently taking a look at Kotlin books and literally banged my head on the table. I realized the language has a good rap but it is ridiculously feature-laden .. to the point they threw in the kitchen sink. A key positive of languages is easiness to learn. I really wonder about Kotlin. It may be well-designed, but did it really need to be so big? I'm also curious if it is just me. I am a grey hair now, with many other responsibilities. Why were C, Python and Go so easy for me when kotlin seems so hard to penetrate (for me)? Is there a way to quantify language complexity?
    • sgammon 2y ago
      What do you mean "so big?" Kotlin doesn't feel "big" to me. ` enum class Sample { A, B } val x: Sample = Sample.A val y = when (x) { Sample.A → 0 Sample.B → 1 } ` I think if you give it time you might like it. It takes some getting used to, sure, but especially compared with the alternatives (Java to use JVM, Java on Android, etc) it's pretty great. Cross-platform Kotlin is very new but it works surprisingly well.
    • sgammon 2y ago
      I will also say: Android Kotlin and pure server Kotlin are entirely different beasts. If you are on Android and you are frustrated with Kotlin, it is probably Android. Kotlin compiles now to JS, WASM... even LLVM bitcode if you want it to. Coming to Kotlin from a pure lang perspective, I'm not sure what it would be like, it might not be you. I know as someone who came to it through Java that it is a massive improvement on what I had before.
    • lookdangerous 2y ago
      I found Kotlin easy to pick up, and use, but there are always complicated parts of it I haven't yet grokked. I'm sure a working knowledge of it is easy to obtain but I'm with you on the more dense pieces.
• kevmo314 2y ago
  Getting native libraries to work well on Android is a beast. I happened to have done exactly what you're describing though, specifically rendering libusb through an Android phone. My code is at https://github.com/kevmo314/kineticstreamer https://github.com/kevmo314/kineticstreamer and you might be particularly interested in the CMake build at https://github.com/kevmo314/kineticstreamer/blob/main/app/src/main/jni/CMakeLists.txt https://github.com/kevmo314/kineticstreamer/blob/main/app/sr... Happy to answer any questions or help you out if you decide to keep going down this road, shoot me an email at kevmo314@gmail.com. Ultimately an Android phone is still just a Linux computer but jumping through the hoops is definitely hard.
  • ssahoo 2y ago
    It's not that awful once you get hang of it, but it's a mess made by google. Kotlin which is maintained Jetbrain is catching up. Google is far less interested in owning kotlin. Therefore creating a confusion with mix of grovy, maven, java and xml as hell.
  • clumsysmurf 2y ago
    Don't forget Android 15 changes pagesize from 4K to 16K, and you have to recompile those ... https://developer.android.com/about/versions/15/behavior-changes-all#16-kb https://developer.android.com/about/versions/15/behavior-cha...
  • iiJDSii 2y ago
    Hey thanks for this! I gave it a try, imported and built in my Android Studio ("Koala" if that matters), tried getting it installed on a phone, and unfortunately got this cryptic error: > ninja: error: 'lib/libjpeg.so', needed by 'C:/Users/ADMIN/AndroidStudioProjects/kineticstreamer/app/build/intermediates/cxx/Debug/3xf5p505/obj/arm64-v8a/libkinetic.so', missing and no known rule to make it That being said, I browsed through the code some more and while I think it's a great Android project, I don't think (assuming I got it working) it would be advisable for me to build on top of this. The existing complexity, and my lack of faith on cross-compatibility (different phones, SDK updates, etc) are a turn off. Heck I've even seen certain libraries and includes fail because they require different versions of Java/JDK that I have available. So in summary, I think the solution for myself at least for now, will be to explore a different hardware route. A cheap raspberry pi equivalent, with a small display, and battery - annoying to have all these extra components but at least I know it'll work reliably.
• stefan_ 2y ago
  You are just trying to do something that nobody cares about making work on smartphones, and so you are "on your own". Trying to do userland USB in an Android app to talk to a UVC webcam connected through USB OTG is not something even a niche of apps care for, and the native camera framework definitely doesn't care about because if it was trying to workaround the UVC spec Android phone cameras would have never left the original Gameboy camera age. So with no native support for your use case, you are now having to wrangle the pretty shitty libusb and the even more terrible libuvc in working within the confines of an Android app. And to the credit of Android, this is possible! People have made it work! People with in depth knowledge of how the parts fit together, that is, and so GPT won't be of any help.
• giantg2 2y ago
  "Using Python scripting and OpenCV, I had a working cross-compatible script in 10 minutes, for both Linux and Windows." What took you 10 minutes would take me a long time to learn. I rather enjoyed making some basic Android apps. I didn't work with much hardware stuff and heard that part is tough due to all the variations.
  • iiJDSii 2y ago
    Appreciate the ego boost, but it was literally some modifications to python opencv demos available on their webpage. But that's what's amazing, it was up and running so fast and worked cross-platform after 5 minutes of debugging something with ChatGPT. Yes it's become quite clear to me that using an Android phone is not a good development platform to work with external hardware devices. I understand this has never been it's intended purpose, but come on, we have a linux kernel sitting under the hood. Just feels like a waste of potential.
    • giantg2 2y ago
      Why use external hardware when they have cameras built in? I'm sure you could find an example or open source app that uses the camera and just modify that, like you did with the openCV.
• danpalmer 2y ago
  There's a bigger issue here: OP describes writing prototype software on a desktop, and compares this to writing more production-style software on a highly constrained mobile device. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Python packaging is notoriously bad, and while you can get a Linux/Windows compatible script without too much work, getting to a single executable that just runs is much harder. Cloning a repo, setting up a virtualenv, installing an openssl dependendcy or whatever, is just not something that exists in the mobile world. We have to put more effort into the packaging, and that means a higher bar for things like this. There are answers to this in Python that claim to produce single, relocatable, Python binaries, and I've never seen one without a huge list of caveats. Even yesterday I was patching an open source library that didn't work inside one of these because it had the gaul to use... checks notes, os.path. > Well, looks like modern mobile phones are not a great hacker's playground, huh? This sums it up. They are not. The security environment on these devices pretty much ends this before you even get to writing any code, and that's generally a good thing. Phones are appliances for most people. There's a reason why "apps" took off in a way that boxed desktop software never did, and there's a reason why boxed desktop software on Windows did far better than package managers on Linux. Almost everyone wants more a more polished experience. Shipping a Python script running OpenCV to a phone is not going to produce a polished experience.
  • brrrrrm 2y ago
    amazingly, the browser has pretty much solved all of this. fully compatible EMCAscript implementations on every single device with hardware access (such as the camera, as is needed in this post) I don't buy your "security through difficulty" argument for that reason alone.
    • danpalmer 2y ago
      I don't really mean "security through difficulty", I mean that on phones we have sandboxing, permissions, and a bunch of other factors that make phones much more secure than the average desktop/laptop. Browsers do provide a pretty good option here, but that comes at the cost of the browsers themselves being highly complex, and privileged software on the devices. OP writing this prototype as a web app would likely have been the path of least resistance to having something work on mobile.
• qiqitori 2y ago
  10 Install an app that is able to use UVC cameras 20 If works goto 50 30 Else Use a different phone and goto 10 50 Find an open-source app that is able to use UVC cameras 60 If it doesn't work goto 50 (find another app) 70 Try compiling the open-source app 80 If it works goto 150 90 ??? 150 Reduce open-source app to minimum code necessary 160 Add own code 170 Make sure the phone doesn't overheat and/or develop a bloated battery when you leave it running for weeks and weeks
• drpixie 2y ago
  Strong agree - it's horrible. I can't get past the enormous amount of boilerplate code that's required to do anything - even the proverbial Hello World.
• nicebyte 2y ago
  Take it from someone who has worked on android dev tools - yes.
• JackYoustra 2y ago
  Try using Expo! I've found it to be much easier than native development on either platform, and its fairly easy to move through if you know web stuff.
• johnklos 2y ago
  I remember asking some Android devs, "How do I install a compiler on Android?" They proceeded to tell me what to download on my laptop. I repeated my question, emphasizing "ON Android". They gave me blank looks. I said, "I want to install a toolchain ON an Android device, and run it there. How do I do that?" They had no idea. I asked, "What if you want to compile something that requires compiling something, then using that something further down the line, like Perl?" Again, no idea. A platform without a native toolchain is a very awkward place to be. I stopped trying to wrap my head around it and stopped playing with Android.
  • stevenhuang 2y ago
    Sounds like an X Y problem. What you want is to cross compile using the NDK toolchain. That should get you 95% of the way there (barring tweaking with downstream project flags to work with bionic libc and limited Android user land and other Android idiosyncrasies)
    • johnklos 2y ago
      What I really want (or wanted, I should say) is a native toolchain that runs on the Android device, not a cross toolchain that runs elsewhere. NDK isn't that.
  • _ea1k 2y ago
    To me it just sounds like you want Termux. It works pretty well for things like gcc, Python, or Perl. For fun, I managed to get a full X environment running, including Intellij! The amazing thing was that it actually ran fairly decently on a Pixel 5, though it did tend to run out of memory with anything more than trivial projects.
    • johnklos 2y ago
      This looks like exactly what I wanted to find! Thank you. I had been soured by the Android platform because I bought a brand new device, mostly because it had a physical keyboard, only to find out that it wouldn't get any new updates, nor could I use Skype on it, nor could I tether with it. Android was supposed to be the "open" platform, but at the time (which, admittedly, was something like ten or so years ago), it wasn't. If I can use Termux to get a modern OpenSSH on to my device, it may get used yet! Thank you :)
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• qwerty456127 2y ago
  > Using Python scripting and OpenCV, I had a working cross-compatible script in 10 minutes, for both Linux and Windows. Which toolkit did you use?
• lawgimenez 2y ago
  Started Android development back in 2011, Android SDK was just a plugin for Eclipse back then. It's way better now compared to before. Does anyone remember Ant, it was way worse. But I feel you, if you don't have enough experience dealing with different Android, Gradle, AS errors then you're really having a bad day. But shouldn't be a deal breaker, just give it some time and more familiarity.
• crossroadsguy 2y ago
  It is pathetic. I have been an Android developer for more than a decade and some aspects of it have become shittier. One of the other, seems tangential problems, in Android development world is architecture fatigue. Every other week the cool kids will change to something else and everything else becomes "so old school". For what? No one knows. It's just because the upstream (i.e. famous) cool kids are doing that. One blog post or even tweet by them and your junior teammates indignantly start demanding we must rewrite the whole codebase to the new holy tunes. Then there are libraries. In a way that is great that we have so many libs especially compared to iOS dev world. But then even small tasks means someone just added a library and you have a hard time explaining that just because there is a library doesn't mean you should add it without thinking of the implications and maybe not at all add it if all you have to do add a bit of code on your own for a tiny task. If you ever have to work with native code (or things like OpenCV) start praying from day one and never stop. You need bigger and bigger laptops to even run that disgrace of an IDE Android Studio. This always gets me! So dev tools/env? Oh, god! Fuck Google!
  • ivm 2y ago
    Coming from iOS development, it was incredibly frustrating not to have an event for software keyboard appearance/disappearance. I tried researching the issue and ended up in Google Groups, where an official Google representative was smugly telling the developers that they did not need such a feature to make Android apps.
    • crossroadsguy 2y ago
      Ah, those Google Groups where you are made to feel like an idiot for just reporting an issue and then few centuries later someone with some @google.com email comes and says something completely unrelated and closes it.
• gsky 2y ago
  I enjoyed building Android apps using flutter framework but never touched the native though
• yieldcrv 2y ago
  Android development is pretty bad but I never had trouble loading in C/C++ libraries with the NDK beyond the debugging issues
• fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  Yes, the Android SDK has to be one of the worst software packages to ever have been written. Just look at the sourcecode for TextView[0] if you want to see for yourself. 8,700 lines of code to show text on the screen? Well actually, TextView is actually a full blown text editor with the editing functionality turned off as a flag. EditText just wraps TextView and sets the `ediable` field to true. What genius software design! Ever wonder how those selection handles appear when you long press on text in a TextView? I wonder what component that is? Trick question – its built right in to TextView as well! It uses a popup window the displays the handles in global coordinates which it gets using a mixture of `getLocationInWindow` and `getLocationOnScreen`.[1] Another stroke of genius form the Android SDK! Want to change any of this functionality slightly? Now you have to make your own TextView starting from StaticLayout. [0] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/jb-mr0-release/core/java/android/widget/TextView.java https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/... [1] https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/main:frameworks/base/core/java/android/widget/Editor.java;drc=9039c4010e2fa18fc1b769039634784e9d169d69;l=3740 https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/...
  • flutas 2y ago
    Lmao, tbh all this is coming across as "Jr Engineer knows everything" syndrome. The fact your [1] link is a class that's not even used in the TextView class isn't lost on me to start. They share an interface though, scary!1!! The fact your [0] link is to a copy of the TextView from 2017 is even funnier. > Just look at the sourcecode for TextView[0] if you want to see for yourself. 8,700 lines of code to show text on the screen? Well actually, TextView is actually a full blown text editor with the editing functionality turned off as a flag. Hmm yes, 8,700 lines to "just show text". No hyperbole detected there. Who cares about fonts, shadows, or any other visuals on or around the text, all we're showing is "just text". > Well actually, TextView is actually a full blown text editor with the editing functionality turned off as a flag. And? It's called code de-duplication. While realistically I think the better approach would have been to have TextEdit be the barebones display only and Editor add the editing functionality, sometimes code is so tightly coupled for reasons that you can't do that easily. This approach is much better than hitting cmd+c/cmd+v and copying the code into a new class. The funniest part to me is that your rant is about TextViews though. When that's been soft deprecated for 5 years already (replaced by Compose Text element).
• qwerty456127 2y ago
  > I have devices with USB OTG, and a USB-C hub for the webcam. Using an external webcam with an Android device seems a fairly exotic scenario doesn't it? Whatever, I would intuitively expect (disclaimer: almost no experience in mobile development) the Android OS to detect a USB-attached camera as another built-in camera and expose it via common APIs rather than let you access it via some sort of low-level libs reading the USB.
• cylinder714 2y ago
  "PilBox (`PicoLisp Box') is a generic Android App which allows to write Apps in pure PicoLisp, without touching Java, and without the need of an Android SDK. "You do not need to root your device. And - if you prefer - you do not need a separate development machine (PC or laptop): All can be done in a terminal on the device, and even in a Lisp REPL while the App is running." https://picolisp.com/wiki/?pilbox https://picolisp.com/wiki/?pilbox
• cageface 2y ago
  Not only is Android a mess but the Google Play Store is terrible too. There's now this insane requirement that devs have to find 20 testers on their own for two weeks before publishing anything and, incredibly, the Play Store review process is also qualitatively slower and worse than Apple's. I think we're going to see the tendency accelerate to develop and validate ideas on iOS first and only later outsource a crappy Android port.
  • eYrKEC2 2y ago
    External play stores can't come too soon.
  • Klonoar 2y ago
    What do you mean “going to see”? It’s been that way for over a decade, albeit with some ebb and flow.
    • cageface 2y ago
      Going to see accelerate.
• Larrikin 2y ago
  Android development is Kotlin. Sometimes C++, but I've never seen or worked on a project that needed it. Using any other language will be an uphill battle that will make your life harder. OpenCV also has a warning and a guide for people trying to use it for Android dev https://opencv.org/android/ https://opencv.org/android/. Did you look through this? Also why do you want to use a USB camera when every phone has a couple cameras built in? I think you're going down a road of frustration if you think mobile OSes aren't built with completely different use cases in mind than desktop environments. Theres a lot of information the Android dev site about getting up and running with the camera. You can pass a lot of the photo stuff off to other camera apps on your phone, but if you really need to do stuff in the app theres an official Android library for making your life easier. Theres also a lot of official Android libraries and well known libraries for images and videos that might be easier to work with than OpenCV. You don't actually say what you are trying to ultimately do. Gradle is the part of Android dev everyone hates.
• mijkal 2y ago
  I've found React Native, especially in recent times, to provide a very good mobile dev environment. I wrote an app and had it running in both iOS and Android in no time (with minimal iOS dev and zero Android xp prior to that). My app included the Jitsi video extension (with very customized Jitsi controls and self-hosted backend), so not just a simple CRUD app. (To be fair, my background is mostly Node and React, but those skills made it a breeze.)
  • synergy20 2y ago
    or capacitorjs
• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  Related from just over a month ago: Why is Android Development so difficult/complex? (compared to Web and Desktop) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40742719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40742719
• the__alchemist 2y ago
  The project directory structure of Android/Kotlin apps, at least as generated by Android Studio, is indeed offputting. I look at the rust and python programs I have for PC, embedded, and web, and can confirm that the android layout is more complicated than is required in those three domains
• seba_dos1 2y ago
  If you think Android app development is crazy, try to work on Android itself. > Well, looks like modern mobile phones are not a great hacker's playground, huh? I'm using a GNU/Linux phone and I'm super happy with how playgroundish it can get if I want.
  • iiJDSii 2y ago
    That would be my ideal device haha... have any particular devices of that nature you'd recommend? Lower end on cost would be preferred.
    • seba_dos1 2y ago
      I've been using a Librem 5 as my daily driver for years now. I also have a PinePhone, but it's quite slow compared to L5.
• JourneyJourney 2y ago
  Piggy backing this topic. I started android developmentin 2011, did about 7 years of it. I took a contract job in a different technology. I want to jump back to Android dev contracting, my two questions for the up-to-date Android devs: - Do you have any resource to catch up with what I missed in the past 4-5 years of Android development? - How is the Android job market these days, compared to the iOS one? -
• rcarmo 2y ago
  “even with AI assistants and Google guiding me” seems like part of the problem, because you’re missing the higher-level knowledge that Android, like all mobile operating systems, is a sandboxed environment where the supported runtimes evolved to facilitate low level hardware access and provide an “easy” GUI and touch development model, not a low-level one. So you either reimpmentent the whole thing in a native way (using Java/Kotlin or C++ for lower level integration) or you’re SOL. You can embed Python libraries, but you’re better off learning to use wherever native analogues and frameworks the platform already support. I personally stay the heck away from Android Studio (I got a very early start in Android development, so most of my projects are just Gradle/pom.xml or a Makefile atop a “normal” Java tree). That said, you have _a lot more flexibilty_ in incorporating multiple languages and non-native frameworks than, say, in iOS.
• kkfx 2y ago
  Android is a commercial modern platform, where developing MUST BE HARD to discourage most and makes the few who can rule the others, meaning the big ones. Windows is similar but being much older and born without the iron under control underneath it's much less, *nix systems tend to be open. You are not crazy and the pain you feel is the pain of commercial IT. Not strictly need to commerce of course, but that's the modern common practice. The cure is FLOSS, mandatory, from the start.
• shrimp_emoji 2y ago
  Mobile is evil. Mobile is false dharma. That's why all the $$$'s in it.
• alpha_trion 2y ago
  It's not you, it is bad. It has been getting better. Developing with Jetpack Compose is a nearly a clone of the experience of building with SwiftUI in Xcode. Android Studio and the emulators are resource pigs still.
• 2143 2y ago
  I'm not a professional Android developer, but a few years ago I did create and publish a small app to the Play Store (and discovered that there's whole new category of spammers promising to make my tiny app become #1!). Android development is not simple. Take time to learn the architecture and underlying concepts. It took me a couple of weeks and some false starts to make sense of things (although back then I was a college student; a professional can probably get started faster).
• mikejonasss 2y ago
  Android is crazy bloated, leaved it completely & never look back.
• Toni111 2y ago
  Yes it is. Use Ionic/Capacitor to create an app in Angular/React/Vue like you would on web with html and Javascript, Capacitor then embeds the webview into a native app You won't have to touch any horrible Kotlin nor Swift but still be able to publish the app on the stores if you want to.
• Akash_deshmukh 2y ago
  Agrred.Android Studio Takes too much time to start