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by kitsunesoba 1455 days ago
As a long time iOS dev who later took on Android, I share the frustrations of platform fragmentation and messy namespaces. I’ll also add that compared to iOS, on average on Android you’re reaching for third party libraries a lot more often which comes with its own set of frustrations. Not that iOS dev is perfect either, but as a whole I feel far more productive there than on Android.

Haven’t yet tried Compose but it seems promising.
2 comments
lawgimenez 1455 days ago
I also develop on iOS and I agree with your comment. Example of this is iOS built in URLSession compared to Android’s deprecation of Volley so we have to rely on a third party Retrofit. The thought of that is just insane to me.
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Ologn 1455 days ago
> third party Retrofit

For whatever historical reasons, there has been a flow of Android programmers from Google to Square (and from Square to Google). Square libraries are often written by people who came from the Google Android team. Dagger was written at Square but maintenance was handed over to Google. So technically Square's libraries are third party and Square gets some credit for it all, but it's not totally independent.

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lawgimenez 1455 days ago
Yes I wonder what’s keeping them integrating Retrofit to Android’s SDK.
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tadfisher 1455 days ago
Because bundling APIs in the SDK has traditionally led to more fragmentation, not less. Hence the androidx libraries and now Compose, which creates an API surface that mostly works without having to think about OS versions.

I talk with iOS devs often, and most of them do not use SwiftUI because the feature disparity is massive across iOS releases. Bundling features into the Android SDK would be about 1000 times worse because Android OEMs don't update their devices like Apple does.

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kitsunesoba 1455 days ago
> I talk with iOS devs often, and most of them do not use SwiftUI because the feature disparity is massive across iOS releases. Bundling features into the Android SDK would be about 1000 times worse because Android OEMs don't update their devices like Apple does.

That's largely due to SwiftUI's newness and immaturity, though. Although UIKit gets major new additions each year it doesn't have that problem because all of the essentials have been in place for ages, which means when supporting older releases you can either just use the older APIs or use a combination of old and new with conditionals.

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solardev 1455 days ago
Even as a mere user, I don't think I've ever encountered two Android apps that quite looked or felt the same. It's such a janky platform...
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