The litecoin core client still doesnt create segwit
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Bitcoin morning brief with tone vays and jimmy songaustralian banks freeze bitcoin accounts
But never mind the managers and non-technical founders: Whoever makes life easier for them gains a sizable edge. To keep my hand in, as I find myself doing ever more management, I recently wrote and open-sourced a pair of more-or-less identical Android and iOS apps for a pet personal project. So let me use them to walk you through the state of the art.
These apps are native clients for my pet news aggregator, Scanvine , which identifies stories being shared unusually widely across social media. Their complete source code is available on Github: Android iOS and the actual apps are available for download: Google Play App Store. The debugger works seamlessly, and the simulator is fast and responsive. The current state-of-the-art IDE is Eclipse, customized with Android plugins , and it is embarrassingly bad.
Its debugger is so clumsy that I find myself doing log-file debugging most of the time, whereas the XCode debugger is my iOS go-to bug-hunt tool. And the less said about the Android emulator, which takes minutes to launch and then half the time fails to connect to the Android Debug Bridge, the better. Do people really use the android virtual device thing for development? Why does it take like ten minutes to boot? Android Studio is currently available as an early access preview. Several features are either incomplete or not yet implemented and you may encounter bugs.
As I mentioned, beneath the sleek, seamless exterior of Xcode and Objective-C lurk the Lovecraftian horrors of s programming. I kid, I kid…but still. Just add the -fno-objc-arc flag! Android has a single manifest file and Eclipse builds your app in its entirety usually every time you save any file.
By and large, Android app configuration is simple and elegant. You would expect Apple to walk off with this trophy. Its Interface Builder is a very sleek way to put simple good-looking user interfaces together quickly. While Android theoretically has a comparable visual tool, the less said about it the better. In practice you wind up writing XML files which provide layout guidelines, as opposed to rules, so that apps are rendered hopefully well on the entire vast panoply of devices and screen sizes out there.
Meanwhile, Android provides an icon pack for developers to use, whereas iOS developers have to go with third parties like Icons8 , or roll their own.
In the end two things give iOS the edge. It has categories ; Java does not. Java has its advantages. Better stack traces, for one thing, which means tracking down sporadic bugs tends to be a lot easier.
And until a couple of years ago Android had the huge advantage of garbage collection. With that distinction gone, the winner here is clear. Both Android and iOS make an enormous library of software available to their developers, and, broadly speaking, those libraries are fairly similar: Most of the work, meanwhile, is done in controllers: Compare these two relatively simple iOS classes, for instance, which really do the bulk of all the work in the app, with these three equivalent Android classes, which between them include a half-dozen more inner or anonymous classes.
Another metric, albeit a flawed one: These apps are very nearly functional identical, but the iOS one has lines of custom code, including header files, compared to lines of Java code and XML for Android. They also both provide very similar WebViews, which are basically full-fledged browser windows that you can plug into your app anywhere.
Network connections basically have to run in the background, so as not to block the main thread of the app, and multithreading is hard. However, there are a host of open-source libraries that make life much easier.
I used AFNetworking, which is as delightful as advertised. How easy is it to share something from your app to Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, etc? I had thought this would be a first-round knockout for Android, which has long had a powerful inter-app communications system called Intents.
And in general Android is still much better at letting apps call and share data with one another. In the perhaps unfortunately much more common case of sharing, though, Apple has caught up considerably. The Android code to share a Scanvine story is here , and the iOS code here. The only reason the iOS code is longer is because I do a little more Google Analytics tracking there than on the Android side which I should fix.
No need to spend much time on this one. Publishing an Android app is easy as a dream. Just sign your app via a handy Eclipse wizard, and poof, you have an APK file that can run on any device. Email it, put it up on a web site, or upload it to Google Play and make it available worldwide probably within the hour.
Could hardly be simpler. Check install statistics and crash reports, including stack traces which usually identify the individual line of code that went wrong, at your leisure, and you can upload a bug-fix version immediately. Publishing an Apple app is a nightmare. A brilliant friend of mine always advises people to add at least a day to their iOS development schedule just to wrestle with certificates and distribution profiles. And testing would be even worse if not for TestFlight.
Android has its advantages, but overall, it remains significantly easier to write good iOS apps than good Android apps. Combine that with the fact that iOS users tend to be wealthier—and arguably more influential—and it still makes sense for most startups who want to make a splash to go iOS-first, Android-later. Now, with no further ado, let the battle commence!