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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."
He does have one very legitimate concern, and that is that the platform can easily be forked, potentially ending up in a situation like old-style Unix, where each vendor had different incompatible versions of Unix (HPUX, AIX, etc).
That said, most of his other stuff sounded like "You're making it way too easy to use to create applications!"
I am officially gone from
GP's point #3 was about C++ being more efficient by a lot. His point actually is valid. Consider all the things you need to be mindful of when writing efficient Android apps in Java There are so manu things that you need to be careful not to trip over, even in Android's optimized Java. Things that a C++ compiler would optimize out no problem. Generally Android's java is very optimized and is terrific and surprisingly fast, but it's still no C++ in terms of performance. But it's also easy to write for generally and very approachable, so I'm not complaining. Just saying that Gp's point #3 should not be dismissed entirely without due consideration.