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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

> I agree with you, but I do not believe in Google. Google provided worst commercial platform I ever had experience developing for. I had a lot of different platforms in my past - pretty much all consoles, desktop and fringe, like smart TVs or various smartphones released since 99'.

I really find it hard to believe that Android is worse than proprietary, undocumented, Windows-only toolchains of Symbians, Tizens and bunch of other embedded crap, not to mention the horrors of what was PS3 toolchain at the begging.

I think you might be overdramatizing this a bit.

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Please give me back Symbian C++ versus the experience of using the Android NDK.

And if you prefer a more modern example, Android is indeed worse to use than UWP or iOS.

When they release stable releases, they are actually betas, and updated documentation is scattered around Medium and G+ posts, alongside Google IO and DevBytes videos, why bother updating the official documentation.

After 10 years, the NDK still feels like a 20% job from a team that is forced to accept that Android should provide a bit more than just 100% Java.

And now they are shutting down G+, so all those posts and pieces of missing documentation will simply disappear! (Unless Archive.org ot somebody else saved a copy.)

Oh, the irony!

> Please give me back Symbian C++ versus the experience of using the Android NDK.

Please no, Symbian C++ was the worst development environment i had the displeasure to touch. I'd rather hand write every Java binding for every single API call manually in NDK than even consider looking at Symbian C++ again.

(relevant experience from Nokia's Series 60 around the time of 6600, i don't know if Symbian improved after that, i lost all will to bother with the platform, but considering you still had to implement exceptions via macros by hand because of technical decisions made two decades earlier, despite the platform not being backwards compatible and thus could fix said decisions, i do not expect that things improved)

It did improve at the end, the last iteraction with Carbide(2nd Eclipse attempt), Qt and PIPS was much better than using the NDK.

I started my first Android app recently, and decided to go with their "Jetpack" stack recommendations. I wasted hours trying to get Dagger 2 injection working, only to discover I had to write tons of glue code which obviated the purpose of the DI framework in the first place! I don't want to worry about transitive dependencies over an object graph and writing ViewModelProviderFactories (actual name) and persisting my data with Room.... I just want widgets, logic and layout.

Next I tried GKE and it was an absolute joy. I had a simple web app serving traffic an hour in. Probably because unlike Android, they have to make people like GKE to sell it.

Why are you bringing in Dagger 2, a non-platform separate dependency injection library here? :)

Do you think a proprietary Windows C++ compiler for an embedded platform will make your DI uses easier? :)

The Android Jetpack guidelines strongly recommend Dagger 2, and it's a Google product so I thought I should comply.

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