Why does Android make good coding so difficult?
- by metacircle
my daily work is writing tools in C#/WPF. After over more than 1 year on the job now, I came to love MVVM, IoC Containers, XAML (and more). It's pure fun to write code, since simple, maintainable and extendable code just comes naturally when you follow a few basic patterns.
In my free time I really want to write some apps, mainly for my own personal use. I want to write apps for fun and not to make money or anything, that being said, paying an annual fee to be allowed to use my own apps on my own device is a total no-go for me. So I am not able to code for Windows Phone and am also not able to use Xamarin on Android (which is sad since Visual Studio + Resharper is programmers heaven). So I am stuck with Android "classic" Java development.
Everytime I sit down at home to create an app, or improve some of the code I have already written I get annoyed very quick because getting good, decoupled code is just so hard to accomplish. It feels like everything you have to do in Android to create a good architecture is a workaround instead of being the way things are meant to be. Writing the UI in xml is fine, but everything else is one big code mess. Even all the tutorials do all their coding in the code behind. For 'hello world' this is fine, but for anything bigger this gets messy very very quick.
This is where the fun for me ends. It's just no fun anymore because I just spend 90% of my time refactoring and thinking of workarounds how to make my code more maintainable with all the restrictions Android puts on me.
Am I missing a crucial part or is this just the way Android is meant to be? Do you have any suggestions how to learn 'the fun way' of Android programming.
