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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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