Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
by pjmlp on Thursday June 25, 2020 @06:55AM
(#23639167)
Android amazing?!?
It uses a pseudo-compatible Java 8 subset, with no official roadmap to ever move beyond that, everyone is supposed to move to Kotlin, while they keep fixing the slower developer experience and broken tooling introduced by adding Kotlin support.
NDK requires a great resistance to pain with a development experience that occasionally still makes me miss Carbide/Symbian C++. It took them 10 years to introduce any kind of packaging support for NDK dependencies, there are still no tools to improve the developer experience calling Android APIs, one has to manually write JNI wrappers, or use their unsafe C bindings to APIs that are actually written in somehow safer C++.
I lost count how many stuff introduced as one year amazing IO stuff, is already deprecated the following year. Latest example, all the GUI layout editing tools still being worked on, which will be eventually deprecated when JetPack Composer hits stable.
Critical libraries like Oboe, that are just dumped into Github, instead of having first class support on the SDK and project templates.
Team that puts critical information everywhere on the Internet except on Android's official documentation.
Very small rant, 10 years have a lot of stuff to rant on, so amazing? Not really.
It uses a pseudo-compatible Java 8 subset, with no official roadmap to ever move beyond that, everyone is supposed to move to Kotlin, while they keep fixing the slower developer experience and broken tooling introduced by adding Kotlin support.
NDK requires a great resistance to pain with a development experience that occasionally still makes me miss Carbide/Symbian C++. It took them 10 years to introduce any kind of packaging support for NDK dependencies, there are still no tools to improve the developer experience calling Android APIs, one has to manually write JNI wrappers, or use their unsafe C bindings to APIs that are actually written in somehow safer C++.
I lost count how many stuff introduced as one year amazing IO stuff, is already deprecated the following year. Latest example, all the GUI layout editing tools still being worked on, which will be eventually deprecated when JetPack Composer hits stable.
Critical libraries like Oboe, that are just dumped into Github, instead of having first class support on the SDK and project templates.
Team that puts critical information everywhere on the Internet except on Android's official documentation.
Very small rant, 10 years have a lot of stuff to rant on, so amazing? Not really.