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by 0xFFC 3701 days ago
Not just slower , it does not fit to native look and feel, You are not going to believe me how much time I spent for fixing ridiculous font rendering for Android Studio, at the end I just gave up (in Ubuntu. I tried all kind of patches, TuxJdk, changing arguments for OpenJdk, OracleJdk , changing fontconfig, using infinality and anything you can imagine. nothing works). Right now I am switching to Xamarin,Perfect support from Microsoft (because it is important strategic product for Microsoft. I remember one year ago I predict Microsoft will buy xamarin and open source it).Bash is coming to Windows and lets be honest , none of java's IDEs can compete with Visual Studio.

and one of the worst thing about google is they don't deliverer feature they promise. I did a lot of NDK development. I use emacs for that , but eclipse was acceptable too. But I remember last year they promised full NDK support in android studio, but they haven't introduced it yet. This is what absolutely I will not tolerate from a company. If it is not ready , then don't introduce it in development conference , if it is ready why it took so long (1 year ??? and still no news).

another point about Google is they don't absolutely care about developers. Who are we kidding ? no one can deny for years developer begged google for new,faster,better Android emulator. But they did nothing. Right after Microsoft introduced their Hyper-V based android emulator which is fast as hell, They developed new virtual machine. (they use qt5 for its interface). Because they felt threatened by Microsoft.I promise if it wasn't for that the old emulator was still there.

2 comments

> You are not going to believe me how much time I spent for fixing ridiculous font rendering for Android Studio, at the end I just gave up (in Ubuntu. I tried all kind of patches, TuxJdk, changing arguments for OpenJdk, OracleJdk , changing fontconfig, using infinality and anything you can imagine. nothing works).

I went through all that BS so I feel your pain, but thanks to the IDE gods the IntelliJ people fixed the Linux font rendering issue in their 2016.1 release. They now include a custom JRE that fixes it. This custom JRE can also be used in Android Studio (and surely any other Swing java programs) just create a symbolic link pointing to it inside Android Studio's root folder and you're done. Needless to say this is way more elegant and safe than the ridiculous TuxJdk "fix".

Yeah. There's something to be said for having a highly developed intelligence for building great IDEs and libraries at the _organization level_ rather than just at the individual programmer level. Despite its reputation for hiring the very best programmers in the world, Google's ability to create a really great developer toolchain for Android didn't measure up to what Microsoft has been doing for decades.

It seems like Google has tried to pursue a cheap shortcut to IDE greatness, at first by building a plugin for Eclipse, and then, by putting some money into a relationship with IntelliJ and Gradle (who truly are excellent at what they do).

But still, Google has not brought the excellence of organization and deep commitment fully in-house.

If I would be on the Android team, I would feel ashamed that Microsoft in less time that they have introduced C++ support in Android Studio, already has a better developer experience than Google will ever managed to do.

On the other hand, I guess if they had a choice, the NDK would probably not even exist.

Yeah, it just shows that Google clearly sees app developers as sharecroppers. "Don't like our terrible software quality and negligence? GTFO, there are hundred other desperate people writing the same app."