Development Environment

From the not-quite-there-yet Android Studio, to the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none Eclipse — my biggest gripe with Android development is the development environment.

I used to complain about XCode… not anymore! Living with these subpar IDEs for the past 3 months has taught me to be grateful for just how good XCode really is. It’s fast, clear, uncluttered, reliable and dedicated to what it does. Eclipse is a cumbersome, slow and inelegant IDE at best — and yet that is what it is — the best of a bad bunch.

Emulators

Which brings me nicely to the emulators. Navigating the murky waters of architectures, SDK versions, Google Play libraries and faux SD cards is an experience unto itself, and thats before you get to the waiting. Oh so much waiting.

Fragmentation

Yes, i’m going to jump on the bandwagon here — but before I do, I want to clarify something. Android Fragmentation is nowhere near as bad as it’s made out. Now don’t get me wrong, the devices, screen sizes, densities etc are all varied and fragmented but the Android SDK does a great job of masking these differences. Layouts make the job of designing an Android application to work with this disparate device/screen size mix a very straightforward affair, as long as you’re not trying to be too fancy.

Security

Making an Android App secure is incredibly difficult, and pretty much relies on Security through Obscurity, which is never a good thing. Whilst Android ships with ProGuard, the ability to decompile and reverse engineer APKs makes hacking apps a very simple prospect. Obfuscating sensitive parts of your code may slow a determined attacker down, but it won’t stop them.