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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

...as long as you don't need to write code for it I guess...

Xcode and the iOS system frameworks might be weird, but compared to the mess that is Android development it's like alien technology ;)

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Yet the open source ecosystem is thriving on Android, whereas it's incredibly cumbersome to use open source apps on iOS.

IMHO it’s more expensive than cumbersome. You “just” have to pay 99$/year then hit build and run. Or is there something I missed?

Yes, and you have to build everything yourself, or you have to sign up to testflights.

You can develop apps without paying the fee, but you'll need to pay if you want to actually publish. That's been a great move IMO, because it's a gateway to stop spammy apps from appearing on the store. If you put in $99 and have to go through a review process, you'll put the extra effort into making a good app.

Oh yeah I even forgot about the free tier

Well you also need to have a mac. And mac minis have 8gb of ram that makes them practically useless for serious work. So you need a >1000$ system.

I just don't agree, android development environment is pretty easy, what year do you live in?

I need to deal with native code and android-ndk.

Unfortunately the android-ndk is stuck in the 90's, not much I can do about that.

Gradle and Android Studio just amplify those problems instead of helping (the best thing that can be said about AS is that it is the only debugger solution for Android that actually works, but otherwise it feels a lot like Eclipse, just with a modern UI theme bolted on).

They are both terrible in their own ways in my opinion, I could also write an entire paragraph on xcode

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