N+1) Android vendors who think they know what they are doing will make customizations that utterly screw you (e.g., mucking with date/time pickers to the point that they are busted on some random set of phones).
N+2) Oh, so you want to make a buildbot that does stable builds based on known versions of tools and libraries? What a quaint notion.
[Can we just say that Activities and Intents died, or at least achieved effective bankruptcy as actual abstractions, around the time the 32nd flag modifying behavior was added? At some point you need to step back, take an honest look at what developers are actually doing and realize that things are simply not working out. All that anyone does with the UI framework is to try different things and "twist knobs" until the apps seems to work, and hope that it doesn't break much in the future.]
Re:Android, evolvability and Comcast
by ZanyProgrammer on Sunday April 23, 2017 @02:58PM
(#14179772)
Based on your post I can't ever imagine wanting to develop Android apps.
Or any software ;)
But it's "situation normal" for most software development activities, no?
Re:Android, evolvability and Comcast
by ZanyProgrammer on Sunday April 23, 2017 @04:57PM
(#14180401)
Is it? And if so, I can see the reluctance amongst some to call us a proper engineering field.
Re:Android, evolvability and Comcast
by ReverseCold on Monday April 24, 2017 @01:30AM
(#14182150)
So it's not just me then. Good to know, I thought I was going crazy.
But you can always check the code easily and figure out how something actually works. Not the best solution, but it saved me more than once when the documentation or stack overflow doesn't suffice.
1) The way things are done in the docs is often wrong on fundamental levels. Using libraries from the android team for e.g. network comm is often wrong, even if it's "new and friendlier" (nope).
2) The docs are often outdated. Also their examples are always for exactly not the case you need. 100% of the time.
3) Stackoverflow posts are often outdated.
4) You will eventually hit a years-old bug that's been marked "obsolete" in Android's bug tracker. It isn't. There will be a billion workarounds for various Android flavors in the comments. There will be a patch for Android itself with pleas for them to apply and release it. They will not have. The Android team hates you.
5) Don't expect libraries for Google services to be better on their own damn operating system than they are for Javascript.
6) Just use all of Square's Android libraries and development practices. Retrofit, flow, and so on. [0]. In the best of all worlds Google would shutter the Android SDK/libraries team, acquihire Square, and hand it over to them.
[0] https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/simpler-android-apps-w... (sorry, medium post :-( )
[EDIT] 7) the interfaces for many of the more complex UI elements seem to have been made by the interns. Don't be surprised when you have to resort to reflection to style them.