<story><title>ARCore: Augmented reality at Android scale</title><url>https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/arcore-augmented-reality-android-scale/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sidlls</author><text>Occasionally I&amp;#x27;ll write an app for my kids or wife. Every time I&amp;#x27;m thoroughly impressed by the Apple development ecosystem and thoroughly disgusted by Google&amp;#x27;s for Android.&lt;p&gt;This is no different. The Android development process is painful (the most verbose, cruft and boilerplate filled Java), cumbersome to organize and build (Gradle is terrible, and buggy) and debug (the integration with Studio is just clunky). About the only thing Google does better is testing releases through the developer console.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s nice to see them finally providing something similar to ARKit. I just wish they&amp;#x27;d work on all the other things that make Android development a horrible experience.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RivieraKid</author><text>Having developed for Android for many years and for iOS&amp;#x2F;Swift for over half a year, here&amp;#x27;s a bunch of random thoughts:&lt;p&gt;Developing for iOS&amp;#x2F;Swift is a more pleasant experience, the APIs are simpler and more well-thought. But it&amp;#x27;s not a huge difference.&lt;p&gt;Android Studio is a better (but uglier) IDE, but not by as much as people say.&lt;p&gt;Android&amp;#x27;s Activity and Fragment APIs is a horrible joke. I mean, Google is supposed to have these super smart devs, how could they design this mess?&lt;p&gt;Creating UI in iOS sucks. Specifically, Auto Layout and Interface Builder. I usually use Fb&amp;#x27;s Yoga, it&amp;#x27;s not ideal, but less of a pain.&lt;p&gt;Swift is one of the best-designed languages out there.</text></comment>
<story><title>ARCore: Augmented reality at Android scale</title><url>https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/arcore-augmented-reality-android-scale/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sidlls</author><text>Occasionally I&amp;#x27;ll write an app for my kids or wife. Every time I&amp;#x27;m thoroughly impressed by the Apple development ecosystem and thoroughly disgusted by Google&amp;#x27;s for Android.&lt;p&gt;This is no different. The Android development process is painful (the most verbose, cruft and boilerplate filled Java), cumbersome to organize and build (Gradle is terrible, and buggy) and debug (the integration with Studio is just clunky). About the only thing Google does better is testing releases through the developer console.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s nice to see them finally providing something similar to ARKit. I just wish they&amp;#x27;d work on all the other things that make Android development a horrible experience.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>prophesi</author><text>Eh, they&amp;#x27;ve both got their pros and cons.&lt;p&gt;iOS:&lt;p&gt;+ Swift&lt;p&gt;+ Less screen sizes to worry about&lt;p&gt;+ Less iOS versions to worry about&lt;p&gt;+ XCode is much lighter on resources&lt;p&gt;- Mac only&lt;p&gt;- XCode might crash every now and then&lt;p&gt;- Probably need an iOS device, as the simulator is very slow&lt;p&gt;- $100&amp;#x2F;yr developer fee&lt;p&gt;Android:&lt;p&gt;+ Kotlin&lt;p&gt;+ Studio runs everywhere&lt;p&gt;+ No developer fee&lt;p&gt;+ More stable IDE&lt;p&gt;+ Decent emulation&lt;p&gt;- Countless screen sizes to worry about&lt;p&gt;- Lots of Android versions to worry about&lt;p&gt;- $25 developer account fee&lt;p&gt;- Android Studio is resource heavy&lt;p&gt;- NDK requires lots of JNI boilerplate&lt;p&gt;Though, with all of this AR stuff, I&amp;#x27;d just go the Unity&amp;#x2F;Unreal route, as it will probably be very game-y and such.</text></comment>