Originally Posted by clonmult:
“If there's one thing I know about, its software development. Over 30 years experience on a variety of platforms. However I've never had the time or inclination to look into Android development.
Is the Android toolset really that poor? Normally targeting different resolutions hasn't been a problem, and I still maintain that its down to lazy coding. It must be trivial to detect the device resolution and amend accordingly; if it isn't, then yes - Androids developer toolset is seriously below par.
PC developers have tended to put together their own toolsets ..... nothing to stop Android developers going that route if they were so inclined. But they won't, as developers these days are lazy.”
Do you really know about software development doesn't sound like it to me ?
It's pretty insulting and ignorant to call developers lazy. Generally it's managers and commercial people who decide how the development resources are used. Developers are quite happy to develop Android. There are many indie developers who do great stuff for the android platform just for the love of the challenge and there are some really interesting but commercially non viable apps available for Android probably more so than iOS.
BUT, most of us work on commercial products and time is money. So clearly if it take more effort to produce the android version of a commercial project say compared to the iOS version then they will concentrate on the iOS first. That's a commercial call added to what they believe the income received will be.
The android tool set, mainly eclipse is good but all free ware and quite clunky, and if you really want performance its trickier to develop native c apps for android. It takes a lot of tweaking and to get working and If I'm being honest isn't anywhere near as slick as X code is say for the iOS dev which compiles straight to native code. Games are more on a level playing field as there are commercial libraries available( but expensive) that allow you to develop and deploy to both platforms. Even so there are libraries like cocos2d with great out of the box support for iOS if you want to do a physics type of game with spite support and collision detection and so on
PC developers put together their own tool sets do me a favour? depends on what you're developing but look at visual studio, easily the slickest and most productive ide around more so than any thing available for android or mac. If there is one thing Microsoft are brilliant at it's their development tools.
Google realise there is problem and are busy producing slicker tool sets to make it easier to develop on multi anrdoid devices.