An Android Developer's Top 10 Gripes

gkunene writes in with the plaint of a veteran mobile application developer who vents his frustration with a list of 10 things he loves to hate about Android. "1. Open Source. Leave it to Google to place all the code for their handset platform in the hands of the masses. Not only does this mean anyone can download and roll a new version of their phone firmware, but it also means absolutely any maker can roll its own Android device. ... After all's said and done, I really must admit that Android, despite its relatively few flaws, is one of my favorite platforms to work with. Quite honestly, if my complaint about how the word 'Intent' makes for awkward grammatical constructions ranks in the top 10, I'd say the Android platform is doing pretty well for itself."

Comments

Re:What?

[Unoti]

He hates Java. A lot of people seem to feel that way. I actually like Java more than say c++ because I find the Java object model has a less of a tacked on feel.

I generally agree with you sentiment. Generally we don't get to take advantage of a lot of that, though. When working on a performance critical app, such as a game, most of the code you're going to write is going to look and feel more like C++ than Java anyway.

Avoiding garbage collection is a key thing that's always top of mind. So you end up pre-allocating all your stuff, thinking about the cycle of memory management constantly. I'm constantly using plain old arrays instead of collections for performance reasons-- every time you iterate through a collection it generates an iterator that needs to be garbage collected. They recommend you shy away from Enums, because each access requires a lookup. They recommend you avoid encapsulation of getters and setters when you can and just access things directly for better performance. They recommend you use parallel arrays instead of composite objects when you can.

I guess the point is that the Java you're coding on Android, for performance critical apps at least, feels a lot more low level, takes more time to write and get right than normal desktop or server Java. Sometimes I feel like I'd rather have that extra bit of performance and be directly in C++ as long as I'm having to deal with so much low level stuff.