Comment by kykat
15 days ago
Developing for Android and iOS is already a huge pain, browser based experiences can be even better than native apps in some cases. I will also not invest any more time in developing/following these closed platforms, and try to push web based solutions as much as reasonably possible.
Seriously, HUGE pain in the psu. Javascript is a pain on web but mobile development significantly more painful, even though we have nicer languages & compilers - all the ceremony around it is just too much.
I freaking hate gradle with a passion, as every other week I have to reconfigure my ide, again. As it cannot seem to just chill out and do its work, it demands blood every week or two.
> I freaking hate gradle with a passion, as every other week I have to reconfigure my ide, again.
Is there a Googler here that can enlighten me what makes Android so unique as to break IDE between every release?
It's not just Android. I've encountered frequent broken gradle caching when using Kotlin outside of Android and when using Fabric for building Minecraft mods. In my experience, the only solution is wiping the user-wide gradle cache. Maybe it's a gradle issue or maybe it's an ecosystem issue (i.e. gradle plugins not respecting Gradle's cache semantics). Regardless, it does not reflect well on Gradle that such issues are so widespread.
I recently explored wrapping my somewhat-popular website as an app, only to discover that Google wants apps to offer some unique functionalities that the website doesn't support, otherwise they'll reject it as spam listing.
The examples they list of such features are offline support (PWA already allows that), push notifications (browsers already support that), integration with hardware (not applicable), mobile-optimised UI (really?)... all nonsense.
I know they're not strict about this policy as I can name many local apps that are just wrappers of the web version, but I abandoned by idea immediately as it's not beneficial to me in any way to prioritise one particular platform over the others.
> browser based experiences can be even better than native apps in some cases
Not in some cases, in most cases. Clicking shared Google maps link easily opens correct spot on Web, but redirects me to the App Store for God knows reason why on iOS. If I ever need to interact with a new resource, I go check if there's a web site first. If there's no website but there's an app and I don't really need the resource I just drop it altogether without checking the app.
The only apps, besides built-in ones, that I use are chat, bank clients and some home app automation tools that would be problematic to operate as a web app.