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

What?

[MortenMW]

Disclaimer: I actually read the FA (yes, I know this is slashdot). This guy is angry because, amongst other things, Google has made 40% of his debugging skills useless. Apperantly, his problem is that this means that other people without his "superskills" can develop software for Android.

Re:What?

[davek]

Sounds to me that he's searching for things to have a problem with, and fully admits it. At the very end of the article, he responds to
his own point 7, where he complains about the grammatical heresy of the Android programming concept of "Intents":

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.

If "good debugging" and "poor grammar" are two of the top ten worst points about the platform, then I'd consider it quite a positive article.

Re:What?

[LWATCDR]

For some games I would agree with you 100%. And Android does allow you to use native code for some performance critical parts but as the original author stated then you have to debug in two languages.
I don't hate C++ and I have used it for high performance applications. The thing is that I feel that Java gets too much hate. The "problem" with Java it it is too easy to make a program that works. Because of that you get too many people putting out Java programs that work but don't work well. In C++ they just wouldn't work at all.

I still feel that the real problem with Android is in many ways the openness of it. I wish that Google would get EVERYBODY on the same version. I am tired of waiting for Samsung to update my phone to 2.0 or 2.1. It is just silly that Motorola released two phones in the same time frame and one has 1.5 and one has 2.0! or that Verizon released two Android phones on the same day and one had 1.5 and one has 2.0. Or that T-Mobile has phones with 1.5, 1.6 and now 2.1!
This fragmentation on such a new platform is just insane.
 

Re:Unix way

[HunterD]

Simplicity is hard. Programming the Unix way requires a person to focus on radical simplicity. The benefits are huge. It's a lot easier to debug a 200 line program that takes data in on stdin and dumps it to stdout then it is to debug a class that you can only instantiate with your AbstractFactoryFactory.

The mistake that younger developers make is seeing complexity as hard, and representing mad skillz.

When you have a complex problem that you need to solve, it's /easy/ to make a complex mess with awesome hacks that only you can figure out. It's *hard* to solve that complex problem by building simple programs that even the most junior programmers can easily read, interpret and debug. IMHO, complicated designs are a sign of inexperience, not '1337ness'.