Android Platform manager steps down after failing to fix app sales - Page 2

I wrote a simple iPhone game (it's a port of a DOS classic by the way, it's called Snipes! and you can all go get it if here you're feeling nostalgic ), and even though I considered porting it to Android (well, at least for a few minutes ), I would never ever be able to justify to myself spending time on it.

The problem starts with the SDK and dev tools. They are all freely available, but it will take you at least a full day to get them up and running. You need slow, bloated, inconvenient and overly complex IDE to be able to work somewhat comfortably. You need a dog-slow simulator that makes it almost impossible to do quick fix-and-debug cycles, since it takes minutes to start up each run. You cannot do _any_ preliminary performance testing on the simulator (the iOS simulator isn't representative for the device, but at least on iOS you can to comparative profiling using Instruments). All peripheral debug/testing tools need to be installed and configured separately and many do not integrate with NetBeans or Eclipse.

So I'd say the dev tools suck big time compared to XCode, which has many flaws, but at least it is fast, easy, full-featured, well-integrated and documented, and you'll have it installed within minutess.

Even if I would have gone through the effort of setting up the development environment, I would still be stuck, since the 2D graphics and sprite framework I used was not available on Android, nor any credible alternative. If I would have to do all the sprite stuff and the animation effects I used, it would have taken me at least 2 months on top of the total effort to just port the game logic. The same problem holds for many other third-party frameworks: iOS has a very rich ecosystem of high-quality, freely available third-party libraries.

And then there is Java. I know different people have different preferences if it comes to programming languages, but anyone telling you Java is 'just as nice' or even nicer than for example Objective-C simply never used anything but Java for anything non-trivial. I've been developing software for over 10 years, with over 2 years of experience in many languages (Java, C, C++, Objective-C, Python, PHP), and I think I can honestly say I'm a polyglot programmer by now. I can only say that Java is a terrible language to develop in. It's too verbose, too restrictive in how you are supposed to do certain things, it makes simple things hard, the standard libraries are a big convoluted mess full of legacy stuff, it's slow to compile and start, and the whole language is very archaic and static, missing many of the modern features of other languages. It's a PITA to work with, and I would never voluntarily choose to use it over some other language (even C++), unless absolutely necessary.

So all in all, I can verify that at least for me, this article is spot on. It's not even so much that I think Android would not make me any money (it's only a hobby for me, not my day job), it's just too painful and annoying. XCode + Objective C + Cocoa = fun, Android + Java + NetBeans/Eclipse = pain. I would rather port my game to WP7 than Android, because I know from experience that Microsoft dev tools are fantastic and pleasant to work with.

My brother who used to be a big Android fan but switched to WP7 a while ago confirmed the sorry state of Android apps many times as well. All the apps from big companies are great and very well done, I'd say almost on par with iOS. Then there is a *huge* quality gap, where the iOS App Store is full of great applications by small developers, this whole category is almost absent on Android. With some minor exceptions, the indy/small developer apps that are availble on Android are inferior to even the mediocre ones on iOS. It's this category that makes the iOS app store so interesting to find new stuff, not the Facebook and Google Apps you have on every other platform. In terms of crapware made by wannabe-developers though, Android definitely has the upper hand .

Nice!

Not sure what was funny. But you're welcome I suppose.

I think that we're going to be seeing more of this in the future.

Battleheart developer drops Android as 'unsustainable'

Battleheart's creator Mika Mobile in an update explained that it was dropping Android support. Google's platform was losing money for the company, since it spent about 20 percent of its time supporting the platform but only ever made five percent or less of the company's revenue. Much of the effort was spent on issues specific to Android, where the diversity was only creating problems rather than helping.

http://www.electronista.com/articles...sing.platform/

I've always been saying that Java is crap too, based upon what I've been reading. I am not a developer or programmer though and it's good to see somebody who is experienced and is a programmer also confirm that.

I wish you lots of success on all platforms, besides on Android of course.

It really is that bad, I really can't think of a single thing Java does better than any other popular and modern language. Platform independence used to be a big advantage (it was actually the main reason Java was developed originally), but today there are better alternatives that are also platform independent and much nicer to work with for new projects. Legacy software is often the only reason to stick with Java today, which unfortunately is holding back Java's demise, especially businesses are still very hot on Java for everything. Which is also why I still have to write or maintain Java code at work on a regular basis .


Thanks! My current project is an OS X application to control my SqueezeBox, which I mainly started working on because I wanted a better way to create playlists and skip tracks while programming .

Well supposedly. Last year, Google created and distributed Android 3.0 only to its launch partners, and it wasn't open source until the fourth quarter. That's nearly a year of being closed. There wasn't even much outcry from the open source community about it.

You also seem to forget that the value of Android isn't the Android core - it's Google's apps and overall UI, neither of which are really open.

It pleases me greatly to see more and more people finally paying attention to these issues. Too many lemmings these days reel out the "tinfoil hat" comments, but the ramifications of the personal and profiling data that these companies have on hundreds of millions of people is mind boggling and unprecedented in the history of the world. It's scary and dangerous.

Google's management will change over the coming years and they are under no legal obligation to hold their users' data private, nor are they "hack-proof", as the Chinese break-in proved. And for those of you who fear the gov't, they can practically single-source complete profiles of anyone they like from Google. Read this to confirm that they do. Scroll down to the bottom to see the US #s.

While Google may try in some ways to be a "good guy", Facebook doesn't even hide their intent, which is to push everyone to share everything they do, everywhere they go and everyone they meet. Online, for all to see. The problem is, they pretend that much more is private than is in reality, and they keep moving that line to suit their own needs, not their users' needs.

LinkedIn is another example of a company that started off with seemingly good intent, but can't resist the temptation to take advantage of the fact that their users trust them with lots of personal data.

So my question is: both of you state that you don't trust these companies, but do you use their services? Any of them? Do you take active measures to thwart their data-gathering tools? (You don't need to explicitly sign up for their services to have your personal information scraped as you cruise the web). Or have you caved into the "free" (yeah, right!) aspect of these systems, and passed all your professional info to LinkedIn and signed up for gmail? I have not.

Do you use any of their services? No No & No. I refuse to use any of their services. I don't use Google's search engine. It's the biggest tracking device on the Internet. Their search engine knows and saves everything you put into it and can profile even your thoughts and if you use gMail, or any of their services, it can put an identifying IP and name to that profile. I use no Google services. I use Bing only because I trust Google less than Microsoft and because I have a Yahoo email setup for spam. I refuse to have a Facebook page, never run my cursor over their buttons on web pages, and use DNT+ to block everything else. As for Linkedin, I never had a use for it but I wouldn't use it even if I did. I bet 99.9% of people using Facebook in the US doesn't realize that EVERYTHING put in it is the property of Facebook and can be used however they please. It's in their TOS. The EU has put a stop to this but not the US.

Good for you, you're one of the rare ones. I strongly recommend Little Snitch as well.

One thing left unsaid about gmail: you don't need to be a gmail user for google to be adding your info to their databases. Do your gmail-using friends send you email? Do they talk about things you'd rather google didn't stuff in their databases until the end of time? This is the trickiest thing to stop, and the only thing I don't have a good answer for yet. My solutions are either overly-harsh or under-effective.

Thanks for the head's up on DNT+. Last time I checked into Abine, what they were offering was not very mature (quite some time back), but it looks like it's worth investigating again.