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Comment by codeka | Hacker News Reader

Apart from the SMS/MMS issue, the rest of the article is about how you shouldn't used inexperienced developers to draw conclusions about a platform. This quote is very telling:

"We discarded the iPhone prototype we had been working on for a few weeks, polished our rusty Java skills and had an Android alpha out by February 2013."

If you'd said "we abandoned out Android prototype, polished our rusty Objective C skills, and released an alpha on iPhone" I'm certain you'd be saying exactly the same things, just about iOS development instead of Android.

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I don't know about that. 2 years ago, when I was first trying my hand at iOS development, I found it remarkably easy to get things working. The documentation, to my eyes, was simply excellent. I still find that to be the case.

I'm not sure if they've changed this, but I had a hard time finding good documentation for using autolayout constraints in code for a layout that was mostly created in code due to it changing depending on what the situation demanded.

But I will agree Google's documentation is usually pretty short sighted and made by people that don't like writing documentation.

I struggled for a long time trying to understand how Relative Layouts work. It just didn't gel with me and I found the documentation lacking. One day it clicked, but I very nearly gave up on the whole platform.

That said, the quality of the Android documentation has vastly improved since then. The training guides are excellent and the design section is good (although I much prefer the more practical Android Design in Action Youtube series).

Likewise, I got pretty good at it and love relative positioning (especially if you use it on a list). However, it is definitely a steep learning curve lol.

Any language gets rusty if you don't use it. It's like riding a bike. If I'd written this post two weeks after we started building for Android, that would be another thing.

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