[wiseowise]

That you don't have to touch Android Studio/Intellij is already a huge improvement. Awesome job.

[crowbahr]

Touching xcode to avoid touching Android is like touching concentrated hydrochloric acid to avoid breathing a fart

[cosmic_cheese]

I think IDE preference leans further towards subjective than many believe.

I find that IntelliJ IDEs are fine, but not nearly as amazing as they're often hyped up to be, and similarly while Xcode has problems it's not nearly as bad as is often claimed.

My experience is somewhat colored by Android Studio and JVM ecosystem stuff like gradle and proguard though, which have been more cumulative pain for me than anything Apple-side in a long time (Cocoapods was pretty gnarly but SwiftPM has fixed that).

[bigyabai]

There's definitely room for subjectivity, but my hard drive space is finite. And XCode takes up more room than all of my Jetbrains software combined.

[ezfe]

Xcode download is only a couple GBs

[bhawker]

12-20 GB, and only that if you don't want to run software on any iOS simulator.

[jshier]

Xcode 26.2 is a 2.1GB download, which expands to 8.63GB on disk, which includes the macOS SDK. The iOS SDK and simulators are another 8.38GB. Luckily Xcode versions can share iOS SDKs now, so you only need to install them once. Really the biggest disk eater is Xcode's default behavior of creating a huge set of simulators for every platform.

[dagmx]

You’re counting the development SDK against the IDE. Xcode itself doesn’t require that space, and you’d need that space regardless of IDE choice if you were targeting the platform.

[realusername]

Indeed, and unless that changed since, the Mac downloader isn't even capable of resuming downloads properly so if anything happens while you download these 13GB, it's back to square one.

[sweetjuly]

The linked article states that you'd use VSCode, so no touching Xcode.

[wiseowise]

Have you even opened the link? It uses VS Code.

[saagarjha]

Xcode, for all its faults, is largely pleasant to use. This is not true of Android Studio, which looks and works as a Java IDE (derogatory).

[rwyinuse]

I've used Jetbrains IDE's for most of my career, and after that trying Xcode felt like going back to Medieval times.

[saagarjha]

I use a Mac and using anything Jetbrains is miserable. Nothing works the way it should and all the keyboard shortcuts are completely different.

[realusername]

You can't be serious, Xcode is the worse IDE I ever used, while Android Studio isn't great, it cannot be compared to that.

Xcode is so sluggish it's slower than an electron app despite being native, the xcode app upload is so broken even Apple released a third party tool to bypass their own IDE and its undocumented config files look like from the 90s and do not work well with git.

The UI is sort of okay but that's not going to cut it. You can feel the decades of cruft in this IDE, it feel like using Borland.

[saagarjha]

The UI is nice and I already know how to set up projects so it’s much better for me. The config files work perfectly fine with git, that’s where I put them.

[andrekandre]

  > Xcode is the worse IDE I ever used

let me introduce you to eclipse...

[realusername]

I used eclipse in the past and unless they became worse, the current xcode is still worse that ~2015 eclipse (last time I've used it)

[saagarjha]

Eclipse is also better than IntelliJ if we’re rounding out the unpopular IDE opinions

[andrekandre]

what makes intellij so bad? (personally i thought it was better than eclipse but idk)

[shelled]

And Gradle? Does skip the Gradle and that nightmare of a dependency management and handling?

[mavamaarten]

I'm totally biased towards Android development using Gradle and kotlin.

Gradle can be a pain, but if I look at what our neighbors at the iOS team experience (constantly having to manually merge project files, not being able to simply import some libraries, ...) it's hardly a nightmare.

Specifically adding dependencies is super easy? Just specify which repo they're in (mavenCentral or Google or whatever) and add dependencies under "dependencies". When running or syncing, Gradle does the rest.

[mihael]

Yes, exactly. SwifDroid automatically wires all the necessary Gradle dependencies, so you don’t have to manage them manually.

[nicoburns]

Does it still ultimately call into gradle to perform the build?

[mihael]

Yes, since we need Gradle dependencies in order to build rich UI with AndroidX or Material Design. But if you're interested in a minimal approach without Gradle, check out the example by @purpln here: https://github.com/purpln/android-example