[jbk]

After porting VLC on so many platforms, to be honest, working on Android applications is not too bad. Notably compared to other mobile platforms.

The tools and IDE are quite good (they need a lot of RAM though), the deployment is easy, the development workflow simple enough and the devices are easy (and cheap) to come by. Even the Play Store console is not catastrophic.

A contrario from Youtube, you can get questions answered by Google, and the dev communities are quite large.

The API changes are known 6 months in advance, which is good enough, for most cases. And you get them usually only when targeting the new SDK version (except for Android Q... why?!?)

What I don't like though, is their abysmal NDK support (notably compared to iOS), the removal of use-cases (just use SAF, right? wifi?), but mostly the APIs that are never finished and always buggy (Audio API for example), and the impossibility to send patches to fix those bugs.

Finally, the Play Store Console is so-so, but the user-facing part is quite nice.

[pcwalton]

> What I don't like though, is their abysmal NDK support (notably compared to iOS)

Yeah, this is my biggest gripe. The vast majority of popular apps in the Play Store are games, which all use the NDK. Yet Google refuses to give the NDK more resources.

[WorldMaker]

Isn't that Google's intent that the NDK be hard to use? They still act like they may pull the rug at any time and switch kernels or hardware architectures on a whim, so it always seems like Google acts as though any NDK usage is a "bug" to them.

[pcwalton]

There's aspiration, and there's reality. The reality is that virtually all games, which are most of the Play Store, depend on native code. Without those games, Android would be much less attractive of a platform. Even if Google wanted to break them, they realistically can't.

[WorldMaker]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone accuse Google of being realistic. They certainly don't have a problem breaking NDK compatibility at whim, hence some the conversation above and in other threads. It doesn't feel from the outside that Google cares that much about how attractive Android is as a platform to games (or much else, for that matter), where it gets in the way of whatever the aspirations du jour are. (Is this one of the months of the arcane cycle as foretold by the elders that Chrome OS is still dominant over the other signs or is it that the Fuchsia kernel that waxes in the west again?)

[qwerty456127]

You're the guy behind VLC for Android? Amazing job, it really is an essential app I couldn't live without! The only problem is years pass and I still can't find how to turn a directory into a playlist without hand-checking every single file in it (for me this usually means hundreds).

[jbk]

On the folder, in the directory view, click on the play button and then save the playlist

[qwerty456127]

Cool! Thanks a lot! This is it! However there still is a problem. In the past I used to just play entire directories (switched to using playlists then) but after an update (about half a year ago or earlier) and ever since it stopped playing some big directories (with many hundreds of files in them). Before that it was just enqueuing the files, then sort of hanging for some dozens seconds and working. Now the name of the directory just appears in the playing queue and nothing happens, it doesn't get expanded into the files list. But who knows, perhaps I just have to wait longer...

[sevensor]

I quite like VLC on my cheap Android, and I'm glad the development experience has been reasonable! It's just the thing for my SD card full of ogg vorbis files.