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0 pointsspurcell938y ago0 comments

Congrats on making it 9 years. I've only been doing mobile development for 2 years, and using React Native for most of it. So I have an opinion that may be less biased toward a certain toolset.

I'd compare developing on Android very unfavorably to iOS. All the points the OP made are accurate, in my experience. Every time I needed to dive into Android native code, Layout Inflation, etc, I find it to be a crufty and unpleasant system. And gradle is really a pain to use - tons of edge cases and unhelpful error messages. Add to that, you need to support like ten thousand devices, many of which are running Android 4.4 (which, IIRC, is like three years old) and have a WIDE range of screen sizes.

Compare that to iOS development, and the differences seem obvious and apparent to me.

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kllrnohj8y ago

> Add to that, you need to support like ten thousand devices, many of which are running Android 4.4 (which, IIRC, is like three years old) and have a WIDE range of screen sizes.

I've been developing Android apps for years (before support lib even existed, much less all the fancy new kids) and range of screen sizes has literally never once been an actual issue. Use 'dp' instead of 'px' and you pretty much never have a screen diversity problem. All the platform views & layouts handle the majority of the work.

Does React Native make this more complicated for some reason?

shinymark8y ago

Device support is a nightmare from a game development perspective if you're coding in C++ and using the GPU directly. Figuring out why the black box shader compiler is crashing on a particular device is not fun.

spurcell93OP8y ago

Perhaps screen sizes was a bad example of fragmentation (though, because the range is so much wider than on iOS, keyboard avoiding stuff can be unpleasant). Better examples would be subtle device-specific bugs. Like, off the top of my head, touch handling being handled differently for views on the Galaxy S5, making side swiping impossible. I can't confirm if that's RN specific or not, but I do know that I spent tens of hours on Android specific bugs that just were not present on iOS.

And perhaps RN was the culprit for some of these things. But definitely not all.

RivieraKid8y ago

Same experience here. The API is the same, so what exactly is the problem? There's an occasional device-specific bug, but I usually don't spend much time on those.

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