Colin Lee
Colin Lee
Jul 24, 2017 · 1 min read

While there are a couple fair points here, I feel like this is mostly an opinion based on insufficient data. It’s true that the fragment lifecycle is almost unusable to many newcomers. It’s true that builds haven’t improved as fast as we hoped. However, the rest of this post is an advertisement for web apps, which have their chunk of the market for a reason… usually that consumers don’t find your product compelling or essential enough to install an app. When customers care deeply about a product, they want the best experience.

The missing pieces are these. The current stable version of Android Studio predates major build speed improvements in Gradle which exist in Canary builds today. The Android emulator (iOS uses a simulator) was never meant to exist for the purpose of avoiding a device purchase. Most mobile developers use it to validate old OS versions.

As to the future platform of mobile, it seems Google has investments in all directions. Progressive Web Apps, Instant Apps, and new frameworks like Flutter are all possibilities. It seems like they hedged their bets to me. There will be a future hybrid platform that succeeds, but it likely won’t be React Native or any of the current options, all of which have performance that is badly compromised.

Colin Lee

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Colin Lee

Doubleplusgood #AndroidDev. Former political nominee. Thoughtcrimes are my own.