My guess is that that's his point. Java is easy to pick up, but the Android API is such a hurriedly-hacked-together piece of nonsense that it hurts.
Case in point: To make a list on Android, you need to jump through hoops, assign stuff to a "Tag" property (a field intended for hacks and workarounds), typecast your ass of, or if you don't do all that your list will perform absolutely shitty. So, the easy flow is a crappy, slow, buggy list. The "best practice" (which is not the easy flow, because hey, why would we make good stuff easy) is a "View Holder Pattern" [0] that involves using intended-for-hacks framework features.
On top of that, to my feeling there's also a big difference in quality between the enterprisey Java ecosystem and the Android ecosystem. Android-o-world is full of not-entirely-good advice and bad examples. Jumping into Android reminded me of past PHP experience: lots of well-meaning, but ultimately not-very-experienced people set the tone. Enterprisey Java might have AbstractFactoryFactoryProviders, but at least they have no buggy/wrong/hacky/insane code with 300 stackoverflow upvotes.
> Case in point: To make a list on Android, you need to jump through hoops, assign stuff to a "Tag" property (a field intended for hacks and workarounds), typecast your ass of, or if you don't do all that your list will perform absolutely shitty. So, the easy flow is a crappy, slow, buggy list. The "best practice" (which is not the easy flow, because hey, why would we make good stuff easy) is a "View Holder Pattern" [0] that involves using intended-for-hacks framework features.
You don't have to do that. For a list with homogenous items you can use a regular ol' ListAdapter, implement getView sensibly (i.e. re-use views, which is very little work) and it will perform just fine. We tried this with a list of 2,000 items (each item had two TextViews and an ImageView) and it was completely fluid on a Samsung Galaxy Ace.
> Android-o-world is full of not-entirely-good advice and bad examples. Jumping into Android reminded me of past PHP experience
I could not agree with this more. I'd say somewhere around 2/3 of StackOverflow Android answers are downright wrong.
You very, very rarely have to use the Tag property to make a list. You either use Tag as a View-cache system (the View Holder Pattern, which is total overkill these days), or because your data object model is broke as hell (aka, you suck at object design).
Everyone else just uses CursorAdapter which is easy to use and ties in nicely with things like Loaders and ContentProviders.
Case in point: To make a list on Android, you need to jump through hoops, assign stuff to a "Tag" property (a field intended for hacks and workarounds), typecast your ass of, or if you don't do all that your list will perform absolutely shitty. So, the easy flow is a crappy, slow, buggy list. The "best practice" (which is not the easy flow, because hey, why would we make good stuff easy) is a "View Holder Pattern" [0] that involves using intended-for-hacks framework features.
On top of that, to my feeling there's also a big difference in quality between the enterprisey Java ecosystem and the Android ecosystem. Android-o-world is full of not-entirely-good advice and bad examples. Jumping into Android reminded me of past PHP experience: lots of well-meaning, but ultimately not-very-experienced people set the tone. Enterprisey Java might have AbstractFactoryFactoryProviders, but at least they have no buggy/wrong/hacky/insane code with 300 stackoverflow upvotes.
[0] https://developer.android.com/training/improving-layouts/smo...