What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

I'm a self taught programmer and started developing for Android in 2012. It took me a while before I realised that you needed third party libraries to do absolutely anything useful as the platform APIs were so poor and undocumented. There were gaps everywhere and you needed to write tons of boilerplate code to do things properly.

Image loading was often a huge source of crashes due to out-of-memory errors and doing it properly wasn't trivial [0]. Libraries like "Glide" and "Picasso" solved this.

Using the camera hardware was awful. Device manufacturers would implement things differently, and break the camera API unexpectedly. Only recently [1] are we starting to see sane, consistent camera APIs.

Making network requests felt extremely clunky, and the platform JSON implementation wasn't performant, or easy to use as you had to manually parse everything. Retrofit [2] made talking to REST services much easier.

I could go on and on, but I'm sure there's plenty others here who can do that here. These days Android development is much, much more enjoyable. Kotlin has pretty much replaced Java in the Android ecosystem, and there's great reasources around on how to architect your app to make everything testable and easily scalable such as the architecture samples [3]. I've worked on a few React Native projects in the last year. I'm not a fan of it, but I definitely see the industry heading to some cross platform solution eventually.

[0]. https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/graphics/loa...

[1]. https://developer.android.com/training/camerax

[2]. https://square.github.io/retrofit/

[3]. https://github.com/android/architecture-samples

I should’ve known that it’s turtles all the way down. Considering how many years I’ve sunk into programming for other platforms, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I got suckered into believing that mobile computing platforms represented a significant enough paradigm shift to allow for starting with a cleaner slate.

Not true! Having gotten into iOS development over the past couple of years, I’ve come to realize that seemingly no attempt has been made to actually clear the cobwebs on this shiny, relatively new platform.

For example, SwiftUI is just an abstraction layer for UIKit, which itself is (keep me honest, HN) an abstraction for some mishmash of Cocoa, Display PostScript and Metal. Bits of NeXTSTEP are everywhere still, even when using Apple’s latest and greatest programming paradigms.

Don’t get me wrong, iOS is great, and I love it to death. However, the baggage signals to me that a massive opportunity to start anew has been missed.

It depends somewhat on why you ask.

A lot of people are recommending using cross platform solutions. As a hobby or learning exercise, go for it! As someone who has a career across many projects working full time as a native iOS and Android dev, I can say these solutions are generally avoided. They are good for prototypes you don’t plan to maintain long term, I’ll give them that.

I know it’s cheesy but my only regret is I didn’t go all-in on mobile sooner. I have been on a constant upward career trajectory since the day I put my first app on the store. Get an app on the store as soon as you can and if it gets traction listen to feedback and update it. If you’re early in your career this will be the only thing on your resume that matters. I highly recommend you start with iOS just because the tools are more friendly for beginners. Watch WWDC/Google IO sessions and keep up with the latest. However it’s best to keep a healthy distance with things that only support the newest OS. For instance I wouldn’t build an app in SwiftUI yet but I follow it like a hawk because it’s likely to be the only way Apple platform apps are made very soon. Closely follow VR/AR frameworks and machine learning. Those will become must-know this decade.

Mobile dev is so rewarding! Every developer should at least dip their toes in.

That developing for Android isn’t even as half as smooth as developing for iOS. Yes, with iOS you’re using Xcode and have to set up provisioning for your dev device and all that, but once you’ve done that you’re mostly on your way. UIKit, while not the shiniest thing out there, is quite competent and functional — you can easily write world class apps with it while keeping third party libraries to a minimum.

On Android, setting up for development is a bit faster but the actual development story is so, so much worse. Kotlin improved things a great deal and Jetpack improves it further, but it still has such a long way to go. You’ll spend inordinate amounts of time researching the “right” way to do things only to find that there really isn’t one, but instead several ways with varying levels of wrongness with different trade offs. Even mundane things will be a source of trouble and you will likely have to make concessions in your UI design to work around Android SDK awkwardness.

If I could just have UIKit on Android I would be a much, much happier Android dev. Hoping Jetpack Compose improves the situation but I’m not holding my breath.

I wish I would have not fought the tools so much.

I started Android programming from the command line using make/ant and testing on a device because I didn't like Android Studio. This ended up wasting a lot of time and energy over the years as I had to integrate more 3rd party libraries (including Google's own crap).

Same thing for iOS. I didn't like building GUIs in Interface Builder so I did everything in code. Over time as iOS devices came in different sizes, this became harder to do properly. I should have given in early and learned to use Interface Builder, auto layout, etc.

The thing that would've saved me the most time and frustration in the long run for all mobile development (well, all dev period, but mobile especially as they tend to be moving targets):

Ignore the framework. Write your app how you want to write it, then attach it to the framework as needed. Don't restrict yourself to what the framework supplies or how it thinks about things.

It'll dramatically decrease craziness in your core logic in the long run. Framework versions and bugs can lead to strange lifecycle callbacks, weird interactions between the N flavors of how to build UI components, etc, and if your core logic is chopped up to deal with all of this it can become very hard to make important changes. Such as updating to a newer version of the framework so your app isn't removed from the stores.

It'll pretty much always be more up-front code and work, but you'll be left with a far clearer system in the end.

I regret not knowing about cross-platform development such as Flutter and ReactOS.

I also regret not buying a book explaining all the concepts in as simple a manner as possible. As a semi-amateur programmer, I feel like most of the documentation is meant to refresh the memories of people who have been developing apps for years; they're extremely beginner-hostile.

I regret not knowing that Android API is awful.

Then I regret looking into Nativescript, because it was pretty buggy.

Then I regret not knowing about Flutter earlier.

THEN I regret not knowing that Flutter is pretty buggy as well.

Next step is me trying to learn other frameworks, like Cordova or React Native. I wonder what my regrets will be.

On Android, that there hasn't been much love for C/C++ and the NDK is full of interesting pitfalls:

Oh your camera gives you NV21 frames, but the hardware VP8 encoder only accepts I420? Makes perfect sense.

Oh, we don't actually let you query what format the encoder expects until a later API than you're using. Just try them in a loop until one doesn't fail, makes perfect sense.

The camera was a party too, added a listener for Camera session events and the app crashed. Yay.

If you built it, they wont come. Without marketing, the odds of your customers discovering the app (amongst a sea of garbage) are insanely low. I tried a Tennis app in 2009 and even back then it was competing with hundreds of other apps, now its mist likely 10’s of thousands. Heart breaking.

The years it took to realize how under-resourced the NDK team is, bothering to create my own NDK wrappers to work around the NDK bindings and forced JNI calls, manually dealing with dependencies across NDK projects.

In retrospect, it would have been easier to just rewrite the whole thing in Android Java.

Basically, how little Google cares for game related development workflows on Android.

It just took them 10 years to acknowledge this, go figure.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/12/android-ga...

Don’t underestimate the value of build tools. Just because you know Xcode and Swift or Android Studio and Kotlin (or their antecedent languages) are you done. Finally having a senior dev who knows what he’s talking about has done more for me in the past two years than the previous 8 of reading blog posts and hacking. He’s shown me the real value of build scripts. Today even my personal iOS projects are dependent on a combination of Swift, Ruby, YAML, and Kotlin to build. It’s complicated to set up but I can prove that my code works.

Been doing Android development for 8+ years. The main thing to realize is that nobody actually knows what they're doing. You'll have a problem and spend hours and hours just searching for "the answer" but it's not out there. Everyone who has solved it has used their own hacks, and they're not going to be able to transfer the hack to you.

Once you realize this it's somewhat liberating. You focus on the bug/feature and not the method. One time I was trying to solve a particularly nasty layout-at-runtime problem and just realized I could write my own ViewGroup and lay it all out myself, pixel by pixel, faster than fighting RelativeLayout or whatever. And that code is more stable than something where I import some library that's not going to be maintained.

I regret it took me 5 years of mobile development (both platforms) to realize I really don’t like writing GUI code. I switched to backend and infrastructure work and I’ve been a lot happier since.

Example code is invariably dross from an architectural point of view.

Unit tests are still valuable in a mobile environment.

Most good apps are simple. Simplicity is not easy.

Some aspects of mobile development will become far easier over time (memory management on iOS) while some will remain in a baffling stasis (refactoring tools in Xcode). It’s impossible to predict which category an aspect belongs to ahead of time.

There are times to embrace the approach taken by a platform, and times to distance yourself from it.

Mobile as a platform will crush all before it and transform society, while most contemporary technological hopes will remain geek toys.

The remembering self can really help out the experiencing self; you can never learn too much about the past, present, and future of mobile programming.

That JavaScript (and prior to that, Java) would work for mobile, one platform to rule them all.

Work = looks and feels native, good performance, good widget collection, development that doesn't fight the platform, and all those available not 10 years after the platform was introduced.

For android, get good at handling null everywhere in everything checking all the time now, or learn it the hard way later. You'll be spending lots of time tracking down "wait, how could that have ever possibly returned a null?"

Ditto async and observer and livedata type stuff. Never move data between things any way other than async. MVVM and all that, with caching repositories and stuff.

Architecture changes fast enough that you have to be careful not to waste time and effort supporting some ancient version and NIH writing your own implementations of stuff that's newly added in current versions. Yet if you try to ship using cool alpha quality features, that's a whole different headache. For extra fun you can end up with both problems at the same time in different parts of the app.

I got pretty good at Android development and made a few apps that don't have many downloads but I'm still proud of and wanted to share with my friends and family.

I regret that all of my friends and family have iPhones.

I develop for Android since 2011. Since 2016 I also do more iOS. I mostly regret not looking into new developments faster. Things like Kotlin and Architecture Components. They are great, so at least experiment a bit with them to see what all the fuzz is about. Try to keep up!

Also, I wish I realized that Google Play is giving you a lot of stats and data about your apps (store) performance these days, which in most cases can help pinpoint a issue with your reach/growth.

I also regret everything about Objective C ;)

I regret thinking that Xamarin was a good idea.

On iOS:

• Interface builder(especially Storyboards) is inferior to using UIKit straight from code

• Coordinator pattern, which lets you split logic and view controllers. https://www.hackingwithswift.com/articles/71/how-to-use-the-...

On Android: being paranoid about multithreading in all the wrong places before I stopped worrying and love the main thread.

Move actual work off thread whenever possible, but never try to integrate off threat memory access by hand using synchronized and friends, just enqueue your final result plumbing on the main looper.

Be paranoid about multithreading in the right places, particularly when you hand a callback to some black box. A callback that checks the thread it's running on to enqueue itself on main if necessary might become a familiar pattern. You might start to hate all callback methods that don't return void.

I can't really say I regret the path I've taken since had I not taken it, I wouldn't be able to form sound evaluations. I'd always sought out cross-platform development tools first on servers, then desktop, and mobile. Flutter/Dart comes closest at the moment but game engines might also work for certain apps. I'm glad I never bought into React-Native the worst of worlds. It's rare for an app to require native widgets and having to deal with two different sets and their idiosyncrasies isn't solving the problem.

I started with iOS in 2009. I wish I hadn't used Core Data, and made the decision to store lots of large binary blobs in it. Changing the schema became impossible, because the migration process often crashed or ran out of disk space in production. That, coupled with lots of Core Data crashes that persist (pun intended) to this day. It may have been easier to just use SQLite directly.

My decision to use NSThread for worker threads wasn't optimal either, but there weren't many async options in 2009 (Remember ASIHTTPRequest?)

That mobile web apps aka PWAs are a perfect fit for classical data-driven applications. The return on investment for 2 native apps vs. a PWA is far...

I should've started a year later when ARC was introduced (I started learning between 2011 - 2013).

Learning iOS dev with reference counting as a memory management system was really painful. My programming skill wasn't up to speed yet to "just" learn a new language. I only knew some university Java at the time. And while I did write impressive projects with it, I wasn't strong enough in an algorithmic sense.

Learning a framework and learning memory management, and kind of needing to deal with pointers but not really proved to be too much.

When ARC was introduced it was a breeze.

Now, when I read this whole comment, nowadays I'd think: this is such nonsense. Memory management should not be a barrier to learn iOS dev. But when you're in that weird space of that you kind of know how to program (5000+ lines code) but you really need to get into it, and it doesn't feel natural yet. Then, yea, it does matter a lot.

A few years later I learned C and had no issues learning pointers or memory management. To be fair, I didn't need to use any frameworks with C.

The whole damn thing. I’m self taught web developer, server management, backend stuff. I love a Rest over HTTP API. X Code and all the sims do not jive with my brain. Swift helped a bit. But only ever able to build a bouncing ball game. The process of launching on an app store alone seems insane. I started by FTP and Perl then PHP. I pay people to write code these days.

React Native isn’t nearly as good as the hype suggests, and the pain only gets worse as your project grows.

If you think you will ever be cross platform, do yourself a favor and write as much of the business logic as you can in C++ or C. The platform-specific piece should be small and “just enough to make the platform happy”. Do everything else portably from the start.

To get into mobile sooner. I was tired of the web and burned out needed something different. I’m getting way more work and enjoying myself a lot more. I hope to have a long career programming so maybe I’ll change platforms again one day.

MVC, the way it’s implemented in UIKit, leads to code that is very difficult to test, mixes business logic and view layout and navigation, and leads to massive view controllers. You have to be very careful to avoid it.

When doing custom UI animation code that isn’t native, expect 2-10x more development, testing and polish, and still won’t achieve it perfectly.

I built an iOS game using Sprite Kit and had to hack together support for multiple screen sizes later which was kind of a pain. Likewise they make you provide an app icon of like 25 different sizes. Have not done standard UI work yet but unless you use a “reactive” set of layouts I can only imagine the pain.

I wish I had realised that Android app development ecosystem (the dev tools, API, documentation, gradle, dependency management etc) is a shit show and is going to remain a shit show and I should have moved to backend early in my career. Now companies are very reluctant about it.

The xcodebuild command line tool is insanely powerful. The one provided by vanilla Xcode is awful.

I invested lot of years on Android because it is, promoted as open source etc ... but currently it is just their advertising platform, complete control of it developer (removing developer accounts, blocking apps and devices ) and full monopoly !!

Go cross platform as soon as you can! Most folks preaching against it don't have the practical experience. If you're not writing games and writing a non graphic intensive app, it's the way to go.

That you need a singleton pattern to ease the gps refresh problem. Totally rewrite the program before submit to Apple store.

How hard it would be to Port.

flutter.

That Apple and Google would move the goalposts so often, and with such vigor, that it'd result in classes of programmers who do nothing BUT support the mobile platform for development.

It has been a nightmare of keeping up with the majors, just to be able to enter their carefully curated arena.

Nowadays when I build an App, I do Linux/Mac/Windows first, and the iOS/Android release, next. Fortunately there is a vast industry out there for toolkits and frameworks for solving The Platform Problem™ which has been shoved down our throats by a ravenous corporate culture which is hell-bent on ensuring that they own the computing platforms of the future.

On the iOS side, I regret not knowing how horrible Xcode is and how horrible Apple's documentation is. On the Android side, I regret not realizing that no matter what kind of slick new well documented APIs Google releases we will all be writing code for Android 4.4 for the rest of our lives. Also, I wish I knew mobile developers are some of the lowest paid developers other than game industry peons.