> I disagree: they should just dump the whole ecosystem. Kotlin is a shabby bandaid, not because the language isn’t good (no comments there) but because the substrate is a mess of bloated, terrible, OO Java nonsense. Android development is just awful no matter the language.

They should dump the most widespread mobile operating system ecosystem... because some people think API's are "OO nonsense"? Would you also want Microsoft to abandon whole Windows ecosystem just because WinAPI dates back to Win16?

This is insanity and completely ignores the reasons why ecosystems get popular.

The Android ecosystem got popular primarily for two reasons: the massive marketing effort by google and the plentiful dirt-cheap labor market in the kind of development paradigm Android is (awful, bloated Java where desperate $5/hr devs are plentiful).

If any of that would be the cause, Windows Phone would be a massive success.

Don't let your fanboyism blind logical thinking.

Windows Phone wasn't free beer for OEMs.

On Android's case, free beer for OEMs above all.

In this context of disparaging the state of Android development, I must plead: take a hard look at Flutter/Dart. There are quite a few wins with it, including a pleasant developer experience. Declarative, composable, JIT compilation in dev, AOT compilation in production. The list goes on.

I wish they'd dump Dart and replace it with basically anything else (Typescript? Swift? Kotlin?).

I'm not going to learn a new language which isn't used anywhere else AND a new UI toolkit just because Google's internal team structure has put them in a position to keep Dart going.

Back when Dart came out, it made sense. But Typescript came along, filled basically the same niche and got significant mindshare.

This horse has been beaten to death. They wrote an article about their choice of language, anyways: https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf

And now, Swift, C# and naturally Kotlin are coming up with similar tooling, which kind invalidates the reasoning why it had to be Dart, above all languages.

Not to mention that Flutter experience isn't nothing more than cute to anyone that has experience doing UI design on Common Lisp or Smalltalk environments, which I reckon all of us are quite old for SV standards.

EDIT: Or if you really want to be amazed go play with SELF.

> And now, Swift, C# and naturally Kotlin are coming up with similar tooling...

That may be true, but right now, none of them has something as polished and usable as Flutter. And it looks like it will be many years before they do, all the while Flutter keeps getting better. So, if you have time to wait for these other platforms to catch up, go ahead while people who need to write code right now can enjoy something else.

> EDIT: Or if you really want to be amazed go play with SELF.

Oh come'on, are you really suggesting something that looks straight out of the early 90's is something that would amaze anyone today? Or there's something that actually looks and behaves modern out of the Self and Smalltalk world (certainly was not the case last time I checked, a few years back)?

Yes they have, language ecosystems with decades of battle field deployments in production, while Dart still tries to make itself relevant.

What I am suggesting is that the reasoning why Dart instead of something else is flawed and can only be naively bought by those that lack experience in UI domain.

How pretty those UIs used to look like is secondary.

Flutter is being positioned to rescue Dart, and make it meaningful beyond the AdWord team, the place where it landed when all Dart designers eventually left Google.

Where is the "Google's Commitment to Dart" blog post?

Personification of a programming language, nice. Flutter is ready to use, and is very rewarding for quickly building a specific use application; try it.

I think those reasons are entirely valid.

I don't see any reason why Typescript (for example) couldn't be made to meet them (relatively easily).

+1 for Flutter. Fast iteration, few gotchyas, decent documentation, a growing community, very fine control, but forgiving to those learning the framework.

Whats sadder is they could invest resources into Kotlin Native and then build a Kotlin Native SDK (maybe built on top of NDK).

To paraphrase them, "it looks interesting and it is something that we are following on", which means nothing to me.

In any case Kotlin/Native doesn't bring nothing to Android itself.

ART makes use of AOT/JIT with code cache, which is much better than straight AOT on languages with reflection, dynamic dispatch and dynamic loading everywhere.

This is why they gave up on pure AOT introduced during Android 5 and 6 lifetime.

Then the NDK is tailored for writing native libraries for consumption from ART, only exposing C bindings, even though most of the code is actually C++.

So hardly a win having Kotlin/Native there.

Some of the newer stuff seems mostly well-designed, e.g. Room, LiveData. Lot of the older stuff is horrible. Kotlin is just slightly better than Java in my experience.

Overall I wouldn't say Android development is aweful, I think it's iOS is just marginally better. Swift is a nicer language than Kotlin but creating UI layouts sucks on iOS.

Even with SwiftUI?

I’ve been working on a MacOS app with Swift UI and I can say it has never felt easier. I love it.

How well does it scale in complexity though? These easy declarative UIs tend to have a hard ceiling in complexity and then you're forced to rewrite everything. How does SwitftUI scale to complex and animation heavy UIs?

I haven’t gone too far down the rabbit hole yet but I find it similar to React in complexity ceiling. I’ve built some extremely complicated UIs in React. You just have to break up your views as complexity grows.

Animation is very well thought out, and quite easy.

As for complexity, you hit the ceiling very fast, and the solution is to break up in smaller and smaller custom views and modifiers.

I haven't used SwiftUI but it looks great on paper.

The documented examples showing how LiveData “should” be used comprise a masterclass on overengineering.

I'm seriously not astrotrufing (for once!) but isn't Android itself shitty all round? Really complex OS that does a million things and all wrong. I have a phone where no fb is installed but fb services that cannot be stopped are running in the background.

I'm waiting for a Linux phone

Well, if your OEM installed crapware in the system/vender/OEM partition, that's not really Android's problem. All other apps/services are very removable.

It is the customer’s problem, so it is jointly a problem for Android and the OEM. Google may try to abrogate responsibility here as usual, but it doesn’t make it any less their problem.

Dunno, the answer is generally if you don't want crapware, buy a pixel.

Motorola also ships ~no crapware.

But the pixels are (in my opinion) just such complete misses as phones. I’m not sure I’d want to use the latest Pixel if I got it for free, yet they charge an absurdly high price for it. I used to love my Nexus 4, and I liked my Nexus 5. It was absolutely amazing to have a real Google phone that I didn’t have to fight with in order to own for real at the lowest levels. But all the recent pixel phones have way too many trade-offs for me to use any of them as my daily driver. There are android phones out there which I like and would be happy to use as my daily driver, except on the software side they are way too locked down and I can’t root/flash them. I really wish phones worked the way computers do, I could just buy/build any hardware I want and run a fresh copy of Linux or windows on it under my complete control.

Why a complete mess? Sure Google is a popular target, much like apple, where a huge number of people chime in to complain. I've had every nexus and every pixel, all the way back to the HTC G1 on the first day it was for sale.

Sure choice of OS would be nice, but there's a huge number of man hours that go into making a nice touch UI. Something that experts don't tend to obsess over, unless paid.

The pixel's don't have a locked bootloader, and you could try one of the community builds, which I've done. But there's much less incentive lately. I used to root to tether, don't need to anymore.

Why is that possible on android but not iOS phones? Serious question - I assume it’s because of the way android is built but I don’t know How that works. Why is there preinstalled installed software on Android phones at all?

Edit: I’m not sure why this question is getting downvoted.

When a device manufacturer makes a phone that uses android they can do a lot of stuff with Android without any issues (beside UX), other than messing with APIs and legal things. iOS is exclusively made by Apple and nobody can release their own iOS, so they always have prevented others (even the carriers) from putting their own apps on the phone before the user gets the device.

Could google change the terms and say that device manufacturers can not preinstall custom specific types of apps or services?

Why would you buy an LG versus a Samsung? Too many android manufacturers to compete on just hardware alone. Even less so than Windows laptops and PCs. Customizing Android is the differentiator.

I personally hate it, but I understand why they do it. I just wish we could get a class leading vanilla Android phone. Pixel isn’t it.

They've made multiple attempts to do this.

Manufactures really hate the lack of flexibility and there is a small amount of justification: new hardware often does need new controls.

And of course many people like the flexibility of Android.

Because the comparable phone to iOS phones aren't "Android phones" but "Pixel phones". Phones where the OS vendor also builds the hardware and controls everything.

It's just a different model. Single corporation stack gives you more consistency and less bloatware and OEM based stack gives you more market choice and greater accessibility.

It is Android's problem because Apple has proven it's possible to tell vendors and OEMs that they can't do that shit.

It's not an Android problem, as you only have the issue if you buy from a shitty oem.

Get a device with stock Android ROM and there is no issue

Frankly, i think the ONLY thing worse than Android (which you correctly peg as terrible) would be a linux phone OS.

Worse in what sense?

Nothing working consistently?

Things breaking randomly?

Nothing looking consistent?

Aping all the bad parts of the MS ecosystem while missing most of the good (I firmly believe desktop linux peaking with KDE 2 and has been consistently downhill ever sense)

Are Apps on android sufficiently consistent or don't "break randomly"? I don't think I see much of material UI outside of Google's own apps (from the times I look at my friends' phones, I use iOS).

No, like I said, Android is terrible, I just think given history a random linux phone os would somehow manage to be worse.

I consider iOS to generally get the job done pretty well.

I've had all these issues on iOS and Android. I'm dreaming of Gentoo/Xfce on my phone.

I had an n900 and it was amazing to use. the only reason I switched to android was that nokia stopped delivering updates and bugfixes to maemo/meego and then of course there was never another good linux phone.

I sometimes dream of an Arch Linux Android OS. If only...

Already there are some linux phone, like Librem 5 and pinephone.

There have been Linux phones before, like the Nokia N900. But there hasn't been the combination of marketing push and, perhaps, polish required for them to succeed commercially against other platforms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

Er, if you want pure android why don't you buy a pixel?

I guess because they are only available in a couple of countries, are expensive, and Google isn't any better than their OEMs keeping old devices updated.

Hadn't noticed the expensive side. They typically got half off within a month or two of announce. Got my Pixel 4XL 128GB for under $500 because of the Google Fi deal.

I still have a pixel 1 from 4 years ago that I think just stopped getting major upgrades. Not great, but not bad. My samsung note 4 was around a year behind on updates, and felt very slow because of all the crapware. I switched to a nexus 5, with a much lower spec and it felt MUCH better. Even simple things like hitting the home button had much less lag.

I did end up installing Cyanogen on the Note 4 which made it feel quite a bit snappier.

Android is so shitty it has zero chance to succeed as a mobile OS.

/s