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by johnkchow 3557 days ago
It'd be helpful to have more context about your development experience. I've done some iOS development in the past, and as spapas82 mentioned once you understand the core Android concepts it's easy to pick up. The docs are good, and there's a lot of tutorials and small articles to get you going.

If you've never done native mobile app development (e.g. you only have background in web dev), then regardless which platform you start off with, the initial learning curve will be a bit steep. Most APIs are "lower level" than the web counterparts and there's more ceremony to piece things together since you're working in such a constrained environment (memory, CPU, battery, network speeds, inconsistent internet access, disk space).

All that said, I think Android is a _taaaad_ easier to start off with vs iOS if you're a web dev. There's the GC, the Activity model is similar to web pages and their View XML abstraction is not that far off from HTML/CSS.
1 comments
wingerlang 3557 days ago
I misread thinking he said iOSs XML system and not Androids. Original comment below.

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> .. View XML abstraction is not that far off from HTML/CSS.

Do you mean the underlying structure of xibs and storyboards? I don't think this is something anyone looks at willingly, much less actually work with.

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spacehunt 3557 days ago
The parent seems to be talking about the Android layout XML, which is a much saner format than xibs and is actually quite nice to work with by hand.
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leviathan 3557 days ago
I think the parent is talking about android views. which are XML documents and almost everyone writes the XML instead of mucking about with the visual editor.
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yoz-y 3557 days ago
I think this is mostly due to the lacking visual editor rather than virtues of the underlying XML format.
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pawadu 3557 days ago
Seriously? In a thread about Android Studio of all places??

https://developer.android.com/studio/write/layout-editor.htm...

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yoz-y 3556 days ago
I was using Android studio from beta until the early 2.x series. It has been some time but there were indeed many cases in which I had to go dig in the XML representation of the UI file. I do hope and believe it is getting better.
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