Today I tried to create a simple application for android. And I failed.
First a short introduction.
To create android applications you usually download a free copy of Android Studio. This is a free IDE (application that you code with) which is in fact an editor made by JetBrains and adjusted for google, then released for free.
To have the phone responsive, applications are separated into several layers.
User interface - is the part you play with by touching, clicking, dragging, etc. It does nothing on its own.
Resources - this is nowadays majority of the app.
Code itself.... should be easy to develop but I failed on that one. Let's call this a backend - although there is more than that.
What I expected:
I expected an easy way to bind objects on the interface and backend and to write logic behind that.
What I found:
Un-intuitive interface that requires me to jump through many layers of complex logic in order to create an app. Unknown terms such as activities (and main activity), fragments, panels, objects, many restrictions on those (enforced to keep the UI simple).
I wanted to create a simple app that has:
- A list. With items. Editable.
- A menu. To add dummy items.
The list is possible to add - but rendering, data management and all the other things are more complex. Menu gets inflated, items are difficult to get. I wanted to disable an UI item but failed to even get the item.
I wanted some hierarchical view on the list. But list is meant to kept simple and restricted to that.
And objects such as menus are fixed. And made as resources. Any extra objects are made up with some complex code.
I rarely do that but this time I will switch back to HTML 5 leaving android development behind. It is developing too quickly and getting too-over-complex-and-complicated-and-obfuscated-and-incompatible-with-every-version. Just another Internet Explorer where version 5.0 was not compatible with 5.5 (not mentioning newer ones).
