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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a whole lot of faith in Google, based on considerable experience with developing for Android. Put plainly, it's a mess, and even with improvements in recent years there's enough low-hanging fruit for improving its developer story that much of it has fallen off the tree and stands a foot thick on the ground.

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Except that Android doesn't have a fixed ABI either. Google Play requires apps to rebuild targeting the latest Android ABI all the time. They have one year after each release to update or be removed.

Mobile in general is a disappointment. iOS is better but not great. It was a real chance to get a lot of things right that sucked on desktop, and that chance was mostly squandered.

At least iOS made the deep and robust AppKit/Cocoa the foundation of its primary kit and then over the years made sensible QoL changes, resulting in something reasonably pleasant to write for. That, and it doesn’t fight you and make you jump through hoops if you’d rather use some flavor of C, C++, or something else LLVM can handle instead of a JVM-something. That goes a long way.

Mobile is completely hamstrung, all of the effort went into creating as much vendor lock-in as possible rather than into creating a useful pocket computer. There's all this cool tech on and adjacent to mobile that you can't actually use in any meaningful way because every aspect of it is someone's money patch and they don't want to work together.

I'm absolutely not a normal user, but I love the experience on the Pinephone, because I can use the same stack as on desktop.

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