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Comment by judah | Hacker News Reader

The dev experience was better with MS's tools, of course. They created PWABuilder, and it *actually generates a Windows Store package (.appx) that can be submitted to the store. No other steps required. Pretty amazing.

Google wasn't bad; PWABuilder generated an Android Studio project. You open in Android Studio, build, and it generates the package to be submitted to the store.

iOS was sadly the most painful. Not least of which is because it requires a Mac, with XCode and dev frameworks, to build.

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XCode is well suited if you want to build an iOS app. If you’re trying to build a glorified web app wrapper and to boot you start out disliking everything that has an Apple logo you’re not going to have a good time.

That’s not a problem though, I’m fine with less web app wrappers and less ported Android apps in the App Store.

It’s a lot to do with what you’re used to. As an Apple user bought into their ecosystem and tools, I find developing for their platforms dramatically easier and more straightforward than for other targets. I can basically do Android development with some pain and confusion, but on Windows I’m totally stumped/useless.

Apple needs a better onboarding for new developers and definitely needs to improve XCode to be on part with it's high shipping standards, it also didn't help that a lot of the time the iTunesConnect platform was failing.

I can say however that it is easier to create things of higher quality with the iOS Sdk than it is with the Android sdk, at least it was for me.

I was trying to learn native iOS and Android app design been a mainly reactnative developer.

Android was very easy to start. I learnt kotlin as I was writing the code. Java I remembered some from college days decade ago. The UI builder was very easy to use. I even went far as using the dagger Di.

iOS I was kind of frustrated. I had gone over swift Lang some time back. But I found its syntax estoric. UI builder had its own issues for some row column the constraint layout kept on failing. Its not user friendly as in android. And in the strange name/ structure of routes, the dragging of ui elements to code.Considering that I would need to write business code for both platforms I just gave it up. Now trying out flutter.

So, you found iOS development hard because you had very little experience with the tools?

I found android development easier when I had little experience with it.

Android isn't just Kotlin and Java. It also bundles Gradle with its Apache Groovy DSL, whose syntax is just as esoteric as Swift. Although Groovy is pitched as having Java's syntax, the DSL portion of it (as used in Gradle) looks nothing like Java.

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