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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

You mean like the sets of support libraries which make multi-versioned Android development significantly easier and less time consuming?

I don't get the first-party library cargo cult that has developed on Android. What's wrong having the community develop libraries like on any other platform? There's a huge set of very good quality 3rd party Android libraries and even a great new language (Kotlin).

As a dev I'd be rather that Google focuses on developing quality core blocks which cannot be fixed by community. Sadly it seems that Google developers simply do not know how to build good APIs, even new ones like MediaCodec, BLE APIs, updated storage APIs and permissions are an utter hard to use mess.

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"You mean like the sets of support libraries which make multi-versioned Android development significantly easier and less time consuming?"

You mean the ones that seem to change between Android versions, and get weird bugs between versions?

"I don't get the first-party library cargo cult that has developed on Android. What's wrong having the community develop libraries like on any other platform? There's a huge set of very good quality 3rd party Android libraries and even a great new language (Kotlin)."

Because those can't be counted on not to break between versions of Android.

There is no excuse for how hard the permissions API is to use. Why can we not know if the user has "never show again " checked directly? It literally looks like the API and ui came from different proposals

Because you don't need to know. Permissions are sacred. If you don't have the permission, consider the capabilities aren't there and move on.

How would you feel if Facebook or Instagram app refused to start if you didn't give it camera permission? Maybe I don't have a working camera in my Nexus 6.

The only real recourse against combat adversarial developers is to either trash the defective product in reviews or penalize the developers through other means. Holding functionality hostage in order to gain permissions should be instant grounds for rejection and/or further sanctions.

Unfortunately, this is what Google's own app for the upcoming Google I/O conference does if you deny it access to your contacts at startup.

If you grant the permission only to deny it later, the app won't start again until you grant the permission again.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.sam...

That sounds horrible. I can't see a reason why they'd do that. Can you think of anything why this behavior happens?

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