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by seba_dos1 3093 days ago
Already did earlier. Had it's own pile of annoyingness, sure, but general impression wasn't that bad (well, was bad, until I've seen iOS).

But it could be just that nothing has been falsely advertised to me with Android and I knew what to expect :P
1 comments
pjmlp 3093 days ago
Well I spend most of my Android coding with the NDK, and I consider it lacks lots of love.

While some things are understable due to the security issues of using C and C++, having to use JNI to call native libraries on device (Skia, libpng, ...) or C for C++ APIs, feels less understandable.

Or how gdb support is hit-and-miss, depending on device's firmware.

Oh and the fun of combining CMake, ndk-build and Gradle experimental plugin builds.

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seba_dos1 3093 days ago
The tooling is better on iOS indeed (aside of being limited to macOS, which is a major PITA, but thankfully there's ssh and stuff). That's not the point though.

What I meant is the overall quality of implementation, not the system designs themselves, where both have their obvious upsides and downsides. What I mean is that you can't have WebGL context in WebView on iOS without risking crashes when your app goes to the background, because you can't use OpenGL when in the background and Apple's own WebView doesn't respect their own rule on that (which turns out is why AdMob users are often having seemingly random crash reports for their apps, I've learned from googling this issue). What I also mean is that I've found some reproducible UI glitches in Android during a few months of usage, and I've found similar amount of them during a few days of iPhone usage.

It feels messy, even though Apple is in position where it's way easier for them to keep it tidy than in the every-vendor-can-do-anything-they-want-kindergarden of Android. Which is really telling.

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