[kitsunesoba]

That developing for Android isn’t even as half as smooth as developing for iOS. Yes, with iOS you’re using Xcode and have to set up provisioning for your dev device and all that, but once you’ve done that you’re mostly on your way. UIKit, while not the shiniest thing out there, is quite competent and functional — you can easily write world class apps with it while keeping third party libraries to a minimum.

On Android, setting up for development is a bit faster but the actual development story is so, so much worse. Kotlin improved things a great deal and Jetpack improves it further, but it still has such a long way to go. You’ll spend inordinate amounts of time researching the “right” way to do things only to find that there really isn’t one, but instead several ways with varying levels of wrongness with different trade offs. Even mundane things will be a source of trouble and you will likely have to make concessions in your UI design to work around Android SDK awkwardness.

If I could just have UIKit on Android I would be a much, much happier Android dev. Hoping Jetpack Compose improves the situation but I’m not holding my breath.

[mst]

> You’ll spend inordinate amounts of time researching the “right” way to do things only to find that there really isn’t one, but instead several ways with varying levels of wrongness with different trade offs.

From what I've heard Android is unusually bad for this but this particular sentence resonates with me in terms of basically everything ... though that may be because I do a bunch of deployment/ops stuff which is generally entirely made out of "choose your own petard to be hoist by later"

[mntmoss]

The best-case end result of this instability, of course, is the "double interface" - an interface abstraction on top that talks in terms of the domain problem, and then a second layer to convert the lower level interfaces into that abstraction.

Unfortunately GUI is particularly fiddly and difficult to write the double interface for, since you get a "thousand words is one picture" problem: it doesn't reduce well to text.