Also the Android and iOS development experiences are vastly different. Android is much more pleasant to work with. Android Studio exists but you don’t need to use it, unlike XCode. I’m very happy writing Android apps using vim and adb.
I develop for both platforms and don’t agree at all. The Android dev experience has a lot of potential to be good, but it’s dragged down by the unmitigated messes that are Gradle and ProGuard, both of which regularly cause more pain for me than their iOS counterparts (Swift Package Manager and clang’s code stripper).
It’s also only been relatively recently that Google has decided it’s ok to be opinionated and provide happy paths for devs to follow in their UI library with Compose. Android Framework was/is notorious for having 5 ways to accomplish any given task and none being “right” or the only one capable of doing what you need being deprecated.
And then there’s Kotlin, which is so close to being a great language but dies on weird hills ideologically (e.g. please just give me “if let” syntax, “.let {}” is ugly and automatic unwrapping fails just enough to not be useful).
Freedom of editor is nice but doesn’t make up for the rest, at least for me.
> it’s dragged down by the unmitigated messes that are Gradle and ProGuard
its crazy looking back though, when android studio first came out there was a big hope it would be better than ant but idk personally i also hate gradle with a passion...
> “if let” syntax, “.let {}”
probably guard let would be even better since it avoids indenting on the happy path but jmo
