

Ask HN: How Hard to Make App for Android? - gohat

Is it a lot harder to make an app for android than for the Apple devices?
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Pewpewarrows
In my experience, no not at all. Really the hardest part is eliminating
any/all of your ANRs (Application Not Responding), which is pretty easy if you
just build it from the ground-up with a liberal use of AsyncTasks, Background
Services, Content Providers, and BroadcastReceivers. If you can imagine a
possible way to take a portion of your code off the main UI thread: do it.

The only advantage that I've seen with iOS development is default UI and
animation behavior. With Android you don't get much by default, and there's
not really any Open Source scene that I've been able to find. Some would also
say that debugging is easier with iOS's emulators, but I just debug straight
onto my Android phone hooked up to my workstation.

Fragmentation isn't the problem that people make it out to be. If you write
flexible UIs and performance-driven code to begin with, you're not going to
run into any real problems outside of game development. Only then do things
get tricky with all the possible hardware configurations.

~~~
daniel_solano
A good way to figure out if you are doing something that you shouldn't in your
application is to use the new StrictMode API: [http://android-
developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-gingerbre...](http://android-
developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-gingerbread-api-strictmode.html)

~~~
Pewpewarrows
Oh very cool. That will definitely make tracking down some hard-to-reproduce
ANRs easier.

