[jmiskovic]

I'm not a professional app developer. A year ago I invested few months to develop an app I wanted to have. Today it has few thousand users.

Fragmentation doesn't bother me. Yes, on some devices the app crashes, on others the sound lag is unbearable. I don't really care, as long as it works fine on most devices. Two things infuriate me, though. Enough to never again spend another minute developing for android.

Every time I enter android studio, it wants to update. The studio wants to update. Suddenly it's incompatible with build system (yes, the build system has dependencies on IDE version!). Then gradle wants to update. Then SDK. Then IDE again. It's never-ending cycle of updates. Each update has 20% chance to cause build errors on this project (Love2D for Android). Each error has a cryptic message, and it's resolved by something completely unrelated to error message. Usually it's solved by bumping up the minimal SDK version and thus cutting off some percentage of potential users. I dread each and every attempt to re-build my app.

The second thing is recent requirement to provide 64-bit version of each app. My app depends on framework written in C++ with additional libraries in C. I can't and won't spend time to get the build for 64-bit version working. Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide". So I won't be able to update existing app to existing users ever again, for non-technical reasons.

Fragmentation I can deal with. All web developers deal with it daily. But Google's treatment of development is horrible and I don't want any part of it. Because of this I've transitioned to web as platform. At least I can be safe that anything I build will be runnable in 10 or 20 years.

[chipperyman573]

>Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide". So I won't be able to update existing app to existing users ever again, for non-technical reasons.

Isn't the reason entirely technical? 64-bit apps can use 64-bit only instruction sets, which are newer and usually faster, resulting in a performance improvement. BTW, apple did the same thing years ago on iOS and is planning to kill 32-bit apps on MacOS soon.

[izacus]

I think Google wants to allow OEMs to build devices that only support arm64-v8a arch - this will make the OS image significantly smaller because now they need to ship several components in duplicate - 32 and 64-bit versions. This is beneficial to total size of OS on the flash.

Apple did this years ago.

[kalleboo]

RAM usage as well as you no longer need to keep both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of OS libraries in memory at the same time.

[jmiskovic]

Android was written for 32 bit. It couldn't run 64-bit before Lollipop. Currently there's about 2% of 64-bit Android devices (https://web.archive.org/web/20170808222202/http://hwstats.un...). I agree with performance argument, especially on battery-powered devices. But in this case there's nothing to be gained because LuaJIT is written for 32-bit CPU. Compiling for 64 bits won't do anything. Besides, hardly anything can squeeze more performance out of CPU than LuaJIT.

I'm complaining different issue, though. I researched the platform requirements before investing time into android development. I shared my work for free because Google doesn't allow developers in my country to charge money for their work. I kept updating the app following the user feedback. I will lose the product because of this. This feels like rug being swept under my feet :(

[kalleboo]

Why are you using an internet archive link from 2 years ago to support a claim about "currently"? It also seems to be misclassifying everything ARM into one bucket (probably because the stats were being collected from 32-bit code...).

It looks to me like for the past 3 years every single mobile ARM CPU released has been 64-bit, and even for 2 years before that roughly half of them, the market share of these must be much larger https://dev1.notebook-check.com/index.php?id=149513&sort=&ty...

[jmiskovic]

This is the best data I could dig up. I would love to see newer statistics of market share, if anyone has a link.

[izacus]

> The second thing is recent requirement to provide 64-bit version of each app. My app depends on framework written in C++ with additional libraries in C. I can't and won't spend time to get the build for 64-bit version working. Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide". So I won't be able to update existing app to existing users ever again, for non-technical reasons.

So the "non-technical" reason here is that you don't want to provide a build for users with 64-bit devices?

[jmiskovic]

I'm not against 64-bit build, but it's too big effort. This feels like blackmail: "Either invest 40ish hours of your time to compile the framework and all dependencies to 64-bit, or you won't be able to update the app for existing users anymore"

I don't care about 64-bit devices. I'm fine with them not being able to install or run the app, if that's how it is. People with 64-bit devices can easily afford better products that my app tries to replace. I don't own device to test the 64-bit version, and I don't know anyone who does.

I care about existing users. I kept minimum SDK version as low as possible so that my app might reach all the cheap phones in poorer parts of world. It actually works today across many different devices, so what has changed?

[ryandrake]

For all but the most complex, or assembly-optimized, or just poorly written software, supporting 64-bit should be no more than a recompile. When I started producing 64-bit versions of my iOS apps, at first I didn’t even know it happened because Xcode just did it for me. Any yes, they included C and C++, and 3rd party code. It took zero hours to support. It was almost too automatic for comfort.

[saagarjha]

You might not always have access to the source of something you ship with your app.

[robocat]

> Every time I enter android studio, it wants to update

Xcode is always bumping versions too.

> The second thing is recent requirement to provide 64-bit version of each app.

iOS had this issue too.

[saagarjha]

Xcode comes as one bundle, though.

[saagarjha]

> Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide".

FWIW, Apple did exactly this a while before Google did.