I've been programming for 30 years, working on everything from microcontrollers in C to crafting parts of microchips in VHDL, and I've even tackled PHP, JavaScript, and CSS. But I find Android development with Kotlin to be the toughest environment I've ever encountered. It seems like it was easier when it was in Java about 10 years ago. I'm currently halfway through the Udacity Android course, and I've had to skip over the ConstraintLayout section because it's been driving me crazy. Plus, I still need to learn coroutines and other related topics. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated!
6 Answers
I totally get where you're coming from! I tried Android development a couple of years back, and it felt like nothing stayed constant—everything was deprecated as soon as I learned it. It definitely adds to the frustration.
Honestly, a lot of the struggle boils down to poor documentation and confusing error messages. But hang in there! The payoff is definitely worth it in the end.
If ConstraintLayout is causing you grief, Jetpack Compose might be worth trying out! It can simplify the UI building process significantly.
Have you considered switching to React Native? It's a cross-platform framework that uses a declarative UI approach, which can make things a lot easier compared to constraint-based layouts.
Java was quite a challenge itself, but I feel like the hurdles in Kotlin are just a sort of learning curve that we all have to deal with.
I recently started with Android dev in Kotlin, but I'm using Jetpack Compose and haven't faced many issues. Perhaps there’s a different approach that might work better for you?
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll definitely look into Jetpack Compose, it might be what I need.