Plus42 Equations, Preview Release

[Thomas Okken]

I find that with iOS, sometimes APIs seem overly complex, over-engineered, and hard to wrap your head around. That can be frustrating. But once you've figured them out, they do work as advertised, no muss, no fuss.

Android, on the other hand, is sometimes too simple, half-finished, poorly thought out, and requires weird work-arounds to get things to work. While with Apple a common experience when googling a programming problem is to find lengthy and sometimes confusing explanations, with Android a common experience is to find nothing except other developers who are just as frustrated and clueless as you are.

When I got started with mobile development, I preferred Android over iOS, because it was easier to get into, while with iOS the learning curve was very steep. But over time, I've come to appreciate iOS more. If I had to choose between jobs doing Android or iOS development, everything else being equal, I'd go with the iOS gig every time.

The Android "Intent" description you linked is actually a perfect example of what I can't stand about Android. If you want to copy text, easy peasy, but if you want to copy anything else, you fall into the vortex of weirdness with content URLs, content providers, content resolvers, and god knows what else. Some sample code for how to use all those APIs to copy plain old bitmap data? Nowhere to be found, and bitmaps aren't even a standard clipboard data type. How on Earth is it possible that an OS reaches this age without supporting such basic functionality?