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Comment by pvsukale3 | Hacker News Reader

I am a jr web developer. I attempted learning Android app development using java but gave up because it felt too complicated and hard to me as compared to web development. Last week when Google launched its flutter beta I reinstalled Android studio and worked through basic app development tutorials in their website. Dart feels cool and I feel like I can build something cool without making it too complicated. This is just my opinion but I might be wrong too as I have no experience with developing native apps.

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I have the same experience. I think this is important, and it seems a lot of people are overlooking the ease of Flutter especially compared to native Android. "It just works".

Being backed by Google should also aid it in API compatibility vs other cross platform frameworks who are always playing catchup with the native API's.

Static types, hot reloading, a solid library of widgets, native performance, "reactive" just like React.. seems like a win to me.

Regarding the points made in this post on front page today [0], I think Dart being an unsexy even "boring" language is a good thing, since it's so much like other languages new devs won't wast time with a steep learning curve.

From an evolutionary perspective this can help the platform catch on quickly.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16561901

I honestly cannot grasp this idea that Android dev is more difficult than web dev. Especially when, to get started with Android, you just download Android Studio (1 tool). To get started with web development, you have any number of competing or complimentary or overlapping tools, the combination of which seems to change every week.

I agree coming from the perspective of somebody who has a computer science degree and 5+ years of C-style language experience... but maybe you should consider the learning curve here for somebody who only has experience with web dev. Getting used to typing, compilation (though I'd argue Intellij makes this mostly invisible, and akin to a linter), not having the DOM (and getting used to Android's XML layout system instead), strings.xml, and other shenanigans would make things hard at first.

I think if you want to make a lot of relatively small projects, web dev might be easier for a while. But as your projects start to scale up in size, having proper inheritance, compilation, a type system, etc. has growing benefits.

I don't think that Android dev is necessarily more difficult than web dev, but rather, the first few steps in learning Android dev are much bigger steps than the first few in web dev. It's a lot easier in web dev to get something working, build upon it, add tools, and learn about the complexity of the ecosystem in small steps. On Android, you are hit with that complexity almost immediately. Combine that with tutorials that are either out of date or completely fall apart the second you try to do anything beyond a Hello World app (that compatibility matrix sentence is very real), and you get the feeling that Android dev is much harder.

IME, it doesn't get much more complicated than web development. Even as fragmented as Android can be, it's nothing compared to the number of frameworks, build systems, scaling challenges, operating systems, browsers...

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