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Comment by clumsysmurf | Hacker News Reader

I'm worried they will inadvertently pollute their store with garbage from Google Play. Most people use just a handful of quality apps.

From my corner I hear a lot of grumbling from devs about Google's terrible Android SDK, poor documentation, buggy releases, flaky and buggy tools.

"“Our goal is to make Windows 10 the most attractive development platform ever,” Microsoft executive Terry Myerson told an audience"

I never felt that was Google's priority with Android. Its just that terrible.

Developers not strictly of the F/OSS mindset would probably try Windows development just for some new scenery, if their tooling was that great and they had more market share.

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I'm an Android user and I don't feel that Google Play is in the bad shape that you're describing. Quite the contrary, I believe that it's the best app store right now. And I also own a Nokia Lumia, an iPhone and an iPad, so I could make lots of comparisons.

Android as a platform is also the best. Maybe I'm biased, Android being the first platform I tried my hand at - but that's also because Android's SDK is the only one available on Linux and that's what I was using back then. And that's a virtue.

> Developers not strictly of the F/OSS mindset would probably try Windows development...

Well, that's one thing that makes Android great - the availability of great open-source apps for it, like Firefox or VLC. That's one thing setting it apart from iOS. Microsoft copied iOS, but that was a terribly bad decision, because introducing a tightly controlled proprietary platform as a third choice is never going to fly in a market in which Android is number 1.

I can't find anything I don't already know the name of on Google Play due to all the me-too apps. They need to either fix discovery or cull the garbage.

I think the biggest issue is inertia. Most everyone I speak with knows that the toolset for developing on Windows is superior to that of Android (language, IDE, testing, etc), but it's no simple task to be Windows-centric, shell out the cash for licenses, and convince a lot of people to abandon the language and ecosystem they already know for a new one.

Hardly. IntelliJ is far superior to that bloated IDE they call Visual Studio. 12+ gigabytes to install an IDE is just insane.

I beg to differ. Most of these "grumbling devs" must have never seen what poor documentation looks like if they think Android's SDK has issues with it. On the contrary, its very well documented in my opinion. The tools are solid too, you can't really complain about IntelliJ as an IDE basis and the build system is good too ever since they switched to Gradle.

Of course you could bitch about how they constantly release new APIs for everything, but so does every other platform.

Considering the windows phone store is a cesspool of low quality and counterfeit apps already I don't think you anything to worry about.

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