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Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

141 points by iiJDSii ↗ HN
TL;DR - what I can do in 10 minutes on a desktop python app (windows or Linux, both worked fine) seems near impossible as an Android app.

I have a simple application to prototype: take a wired USB webcam, display it on the screen on a computer device (ideally a small device/screen), and draw a few GUI elements on top of it.

Using Python scripting and OpenCV, I had a working cross-compatible script in 10 minutes, for both Linux and Windows.

Then I realized I'd love this to work on an Android phone. I have devices with USB OTG, and a USB-C hub for the webcam. I confirmed the hardware setup working using someone else's closed source app.

However the development process has been awful. Android Studio has so much going on for a 'Hello World', and trying to integrate various USB webcam libraries has been impossible, even with AI assistants and Google guiding me. Things to do with Gradle versions or Kotlin versions being wrong between the libraries and my Android studio; my project not being able to include external repos via dependencies or toml files, etc.

In frustration I then tried a few python-to-android solutions, which promise to take a python script and make an APK. I tried: Kivy + python for android, and then Beeswax or Briefcase (may have butchered names slightly). Neither would build without extremely esoteric errors that neither me nor GPT had any chance to fix.

Well, looks like modern mobile phones are not a great hacker's playground, huh?

I guess I will go for a raspberry pi equivalent. In fact I already have tested my script on a RPi and it's just fine. But what a waste, needing to use a new computer module, screen display, and battery, when the smartphone has all 3 components nicely set up already in one sleek package.

Anyways that's my rant, wanted to get others' takes on Android (or smartphone in general) dev these days, or even some project advice in case anyone has done something similar connecting a wired webcam to a smartphone.

155 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] thread
leros
I think you're just going through the learning curve of something new. You could make the same argument about a React/Next app being unnecessarily complicated with Hello World.
yen223
I loathe to say this, because I still have a soft spot for the language, but you could say the same thing about Python development in 2024
3np
> Do you want to break your Linux installation or rearchitecure your runtime? [Y]

(But really, Android dev is a qualitatively different level of fucked up compared to React or any major Python framework I can think of. React Native, though...)

ivm
As someone who moved from pure iOS development to cross-platform iOS+Android development in C# with native UIs – big nope! Android development is a mess, it takes at least twice as long to build exactly the same UIs as on iOS, and there are endless edge cases between versions and also hostile API, such as not allowing a developer to know when a software keyboard appears/disappears. It was especially frustrating at the start, but has not become much easier with experience.
samoit
I also agree that the development experience is awful. I have more than 10 years as an Android developer and Android Studio (someone remember when it was derived from Eclipse?) is painfully slow, even in modern machines. Just starting a new project is a ridiculously sluggish process. Also Gradle is a piece of hyper-complicated software that (almost) nobody is interested in, but it is there and you have to deal with it. Nowadays I am basically moving to Flutter, much more simpler and easier than kotlin.
muzani
Most of my stack overflow points are from helping people run their build in Eclipse :)

Gradle is deprecated now though. And Jetpack Compose is about as convenient as Flutter.

hasbot
Gradle replaced Maven which replaced ant which replaced make. The tech treadmill was one of the reasons I retired early and I'm glad I did.

What is the new hotness replacing Gradle?

muzani
Kotlin DSL

https://developer.android.com/build/migrate-to-kotlin-dsl

This one makes sense, though the improvement is minor.

lmz
That's still Gradle. Just a different language to configure it.
muzani
Eh, thanks for the correction. I originally read it as Groovy. Unfortunately, I can't edit or delete my original comment, but feel free to downvote it.
rcarmo
Yep. And I still use Makefiles to this day.
vips7L
Gradle replacing maven seems like a stretch. Maybe on Android. But everywhere else Maven is still going strong.
WkndTriathlete
I'd like to know where that is because I've watched as a lot of major 3rd-party Java libraries switch to Gradle from Maven.
hasbot
This is an Android thread. In this context, Gradle has most definitely replaced Maven.
vips7L
I don't think that's the context when they referred to ant and make.
shaftway
Personally I use Bazel, but I was at Google for a decade and so I miss Blaze. Of course that has it's own steep cost the first time you use it because of ideological differences between repos inside Google and repos outside Google.

At this point I have a clean repo with Blaze set up that I use as a starting point for Android applications. Then Android Studio with the Blaze plugin and I'm set.

Groxx
Gradle is the single worst thing about Android development imo. It's an obtuse, un-debuggable mess.

Library management got a LOT nicer when it was introduced, but surely we didn't need all of that to achieve it.

brudgers
Phones are optimized to handle RF. My engineering advice is to build your application with that in mind.

A wireless webcam is the simplest thing that might work. Hosting a video stream on other hardware might be the second simplest thing.

Good luck.

LordShredda
Except, phones have exceptional cameras. You'd be spending just as much on a dedicated camera
brudgers
I remember reading “wired USB webcam” in the question, but maybe I misunderstood.
worstspotgain
Android is an example of technical debt from poor caked-in design. Its problems are still stemming from being rushed to market (relatively speaking) two decades ago. It's had enormous success as the most viable iOS alternative, but at a cost.

On the flip side, consider PalmOS. It was SotA at its debut in 1996. In the early aughts, Palm made Treo smartphones when almost no one knew what a smartphone was. It had a multiyear lead, yet it got easily marginalized by iOS and Android. Its technical debt was from maintaining backward compatibility with 90's apps, and cost it dearly. To be fair, company management sucked too.

The moral is: caked-in issues suck, but if you're going all in with a design, the most important thing is to time it with the explosion of the market. Palm was too early, others like Maemo and Windows Phone were too late.

muzani
Dart and Flutter were actually meant to be the better design. Lots of features from those were replicated on Kotlin-Jetpack, especially Compose. And lots of those features end up being copied to Java.

Dart-Flutter still supports them better natively though, instead of having to hack things like reactive programming via Kotlin Flow.

rstat1
Flutter is at best no different IMO, as now not only do you have to deal with Flutter's build system for Dart, you also have to deal with Kotlin/the default Android build system when you want to do something not supported by the Flutter std libs, which last I tried was quite a lot. That was a few years back though so maybe its changed (though I doubt it). Jetpack Compose is similar in its "not much better"-ness to me.

I can't remember if it was Compose or Flutter, where I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get something to stay centered on the screen regardless of orientation. Something that I could do pretty easily and quickly with my own UI tech library in C++. However I can't use that code without having to jump through all the annoying hoops you have to jump through with JNI crap in order to use it. So I just don't bother with Android anymore.

cageface
Flutter is quite good now. Performance is actually better than SwiftUI out of the box and the ecosystem and tooling is mature.

Unfortunately with all the short-sighted cost cutting Google has been doing lately it's even harder to have faith that they won't axe it sometime soon.

mikhael28
Centering a widget regardless of orientation (and detecting the orientation) is incredibly trivial with Flutter. You might have just been tired at the end of a long day and missed something.
muzani
Yeah, my thought was it was someone unfamiliar with mobile measurements. It's meant to handle mobile UIs, which means "pixel" doesn't exist as measurement because screens are different densities, different aspect ratio. You could do a thing like make an empty block with full padding to the left or right, or just center align it.

I made a mobile game in Ren'Py and it was hard for me because of the fixed assumption that something was 800x600 and such and you'd add padding on the sides lol. Unfortunately with mobile, everything is relative to each other. iOS was a little easier back when it was one size, but now it's not.

It's still a lot easier to do than fixing sizes on CSS, flexbox, etc because you'd be able to have fine control over these things.

rstat1
Now that I've thought about for a bit it was Compose I had that issue with.

I really just wish the Android group would get over their apparent disdain for native code and just let me write my app in C++ without having to deal with JNI BS.

Krssst
Maemo was also too early I think. I guess the main problem was that the N800/N770 were not a smartphone, not mass-marketed and still too clunky for the general public (plus lack of unlimited mobile internet). Though the upgrade over PalmOS was impressive, went from barely able to load a modern web page to browing all the web smoothlessly while streaming online radios. (though this much shouldn't have been that impressive considering it's just basic multitasking and having enough RAM)
DaoVeles
As primarily an end user of Android, it is fine. I like the more open nature of it.

But it is very clear that the guard rails were down especially for the first few years in trying to acquire functionality and market share by any means possible. Now Google is in space of trying to lock down the system while not breaking things.

deadmutex
What does caked-in mean?
js2
It's a typo. OP meant baked-in.
3np
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/learner-english/...

> to be covered with a thick, dry layer of something

deadmutex
I read that, but it doesn't really make sense in context.
worstspotgain
Sorry for the odd usage. The idea is taking a shortcut through a field and caking your boots in mud, or cheating in Game of Thrones and caking your sword in blood. I could have worded it better for sure.
3np
FWIW, I think it was great (enough that it wouldn't hurt elaborating on the analogy when introducing it).

My mind went to machinery turning rigid and clunky over time due to being caked-in with a crust of thickening dust/rust/tech-debt, especially concentrated on sections "hot-fixed" with the metaphorical duct-tape/glue/lube/almost-fitting-spare.

If you want your machinery running smoothly and be easily servicable with off-the-shelf-parts, you can't skimp on maintenance for too long.

ivm
macOS has decades-long technical debt as well (NSCell can still be found in the UIs you see), yet it remains incredibly robust aside from the years when Apple shake it with big visual updates.
pas
It's incredibly robust compared to Windows

https://recorder.easeus.com/screen-recording-resource/macos-...

https://lifehacker.com/tech/mac-os-sonoma-update-fixes-scree... ... okay I don't even know what's this :D

deprecative
Funny, for a lot of the functionality you get with Windows you have to pay some random dev for with MacOS. Window management alone feels like it's baby's first computer.
ivm
Last time I checked Windows still did not have anything like Quick Look, so for me it's the opposite. The only macOS enhancements I've been using since 2011 are Karabiner for keyboard customization and f.lux for warm colors at night.
pas
of course, but that's on the feature completeness axis not on the stability (robustness), right?

I mean on macOS the Settings are so spartan it can really fit on an unfolded napkin. for power/battery management you need something like Amphetamine. Furthermore AFAIK there are no per-SSID network settings, so you either do DHCP or static IP. Have fun manually changing every time you go home-office. And so on.

pas
Ridiculously low-quality documentation, a build and development system that puts the local Rube Goldberg competition winner to shame, constant churn, total deafness or willful ignoring of wishes of dev ... and so on have nothing to do with what happened 20 years ago.

It's the classic "I would like to serve 5 terabytes"[0] Google problem.

(Their engineering culture reeks of this. See the tools they have released. Angular, Bazel, Go, Kubernetes, etc. The last one escaped the usual decline of incompetence because the community showed up.

Go has GOPATH. Even in a language designed for "simplicity" initially getting it set up had this roadblock.)

And no doubt the roots of the problem are manifold, but it seems all stemming from ongoing management incompetence (creation of shareholder value[1] maaaybe excluded, though I am very curious what kind of inane metrics the Android SDK team is whipped to chase).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI&t=0s

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

aristofun
Android is a piece of sh.. from developer perspective (and arguably from a user one).

Known fact, take it or leave it :)

To be fair UI development can not be simple in itself.

Because of the exponentially growing state machine => simple Rails style general purpose frameworks are impossible, it will always be a challenging problem.

muzani
I've been developing Android since 2012. It was worse then. Still sucks now but isn't as bad. Esoteric errors are still the norm. With 10 years of experience you only have to swear a whole day when updating a library, instead of spending a week.

GPT does poorly with beginners - it's definitely something humans have advantage with AI and I expect the gap to get bigger.

I do not touch legacy projects anymore because they're always horribly broken, half the libraries no longer exist. Many of them are easier to rewrite than fix. You get weird bugs where A needs to be 1.71.0 but B needs A at 1.69.0 or 2+. Upgrading A to 2.0.1 will fix A and B but break CDEFG. Upgrading everything to max breaks switch-case, turns some of your brackets to lambdas, requires you to change your UI from XML to Kotlin, etc, etc.

If you want something to hack stuff with, I made this: https://github.com/smuzani/android-minimalist-template

Originally it was designed for AI with smaller context windows. But it works as a simplified version of our production codebase. The principle behind this is that you should have good peripheral vision and that the shape of the code resembles what it's trying to build.

jfengel
Oh, are GUIs not XML any more? Good. I am a programmer. Don't make me learn yet another language with no debugging tools. Just write the UI in the same language as the rest of my work.

(I look in on Android every few years, but I haven't done any real work in it.)

muzani
Haven't used XML for them in over 2 years (excluding replacing legacy code and fixing typos). They went deep into XML+data binding which people liked for a while, because you could do UI tests without building the whole UI and such. But it wasn't so good in production because building everything from XML was making build times long. So while you could test that it's outputting the correct UI content within 2 minutes instead of 12, it also meant assert(1+1==2) took 2 minutes too.

I believe deprecating kapt now also breaks data binding, though I don't know if it breaks all the other basic XML layout stuff.

Vanit
Hearing about this is very reminiscent of current day React web dev as well.
llmblockchain
> You get weird bugs where A needs to be 1.71.0 but B needs A at 1.69.0 or 2+. Upgrading A to 2.0.1 will fix A and B but break CDEFG.

Sounds like "modern" web development.

vdfs
It would be interesting to see where this doesn't happen, you can't just update stuff without considering breaking changes and new bugs in new updates
deprecative
Difference is that you only have to take your lunch break for it to happen in web dev. By the time you get back to work the following day the framework you're using is deprecated. At least with other platforms there tends to be a bit more stability.
prothy
Web libraries don't update more or less quickly than any other platform. The "issue" with web is the pace at which new frameworks are released but at this point even React is over ten years old. It's not that bad. Things are more stable than they used to be and new concepts are quickly adopted by each framework so you aren't forced to switch to something new, see for instance signals.
iiJDSii
Funny enough I actually did Android development contract work circa 2012-2014. I never did anything more complex than working with internal phone components (bluetooth, accelerometer/gyroscope, GUI/text, etc) and SQLite, but even so I quickly decided I wanted nothing to do with that platform.

Coming back a decade later for a side project, I guess I have the same opinion.

Now with the help of GPT-like assistants, I'm sure I could slog through some fairly vanilla development tasks like I did in the past, but when it comes to building anything a bit 'outside the box', no thanks.

Thankfully there are hardware equivalent packages (mini linux development machines like raspberry pi) that fit the bill, but they aren't as ubiquitous or nicely packaged as a modern smartphone unfortunately.

One wonders if there's some opportunity there, take all this great generic smartphone hardware (a $100 phone now is crazy) and package it with a developer-first OS. It could just be a linux system with a dumb, button-focused frontend for users to mimic Android/iOS.

jinushaun
I hit the same thing over a decade ago. Stick with Android and make a lot of money but hate life, or switch to something else and be happier.
nvy
For someone who has never written an Android app before but knows Java, what's the "happy path" to getting a native MVP out the door in 2024? Must I learn Kotlin? Is there a "blessed API" or design pattern these days that's better supported than the others?
muzani
You don't have to learn Kotlin. It cut down LOC by about 40% by the time I picked it up, but today's Java has become more efficient and supports things like @nullable. Kotlin is nice though, and it leads into more advanced things like Jetpack Compose for UI and Kotlin Flow which is a nice way to do reactive programming.

Reactive programming is useful for front end because the UI will update as soon as the data downloads, so it scales linearly with complexity and API calls, instead of an exponential mess of if-else.

You can use the github repo I linked. I designed it to be complex enough to handle the harder tasks but simple enough for a beginner to reverse engineer. Just download, run to see it work, and hack it into what you need.

ffhhj
Android Studio isn't that bad, but their design system is horrible. After years dealing with that crap I ended creating my own WebView wrapper and moved all the design and logic to HTML5, which I write by hand, never been a fan of frameworks. Even created a WASM obfuscator with Python, and my apps autoupdate without relying on Google Play, by dowloading a compressed package. Whenever these are taken down I just set a flag/link in the DB and the app will instruct the user to get the re-published app.

Sadly the golden age of the app store is long gone. I used to make thousands monthly around 2015 with silly apps, but all went down the drain by 2018. Making apps isn't worth anymore.

ycombinatrix
Android app development is awful but compiling native binaries/libraries is not that bad ime. Super easy in Rust.
John23832
You should try iOS dev.
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(comment deleted)
throwup238
That’s like saying “may you live in interesting times.”

Sounds fun at first, but it always ends in tears.

nvahalik
Where does that quote come from? I have been saying it for years but I have lost the source!
3np
The phrase "may you live in interesting times" is the lowest in a trilogy of Chinese curses that continue "may you come to the attention of those in authority" and finish with "may the gods give you everything you ask for." I have no idea about its authenticity.
ordu
I read it first in the "Interesting Times" by Terry Pratchett. I don't know did he invented this phrase or borrowed it somewhere.
[deleted]
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ivm
It's much, much better. I'm doing both and it always takes at least 2x time to do the same thing on Android. Apple's API are much more consistent and the overall architecture of UIKit is just great (thank to its AppKit ancestor).
muzani
The feedback we get is SwiftUI is half-baked while the newer Android stuff is a lot more stable.

OTOH, Apple does a better job at handling things like languages, currencies, and all those experience, whereas Google is notoriously unreliable despite all the best practices. It's common practice to just "force" the wrong locale on an app to handle translations because a user's device would be English-US and yet someone wants the display in another language. OR someone wants a certain local currency in the form of 1.000,00 and not 1,000.00 (which also wreaks havoc with BigDecimal etc) and yet they'll keep the language and formatting as English and you'd have to do some override. We spent weeks on things like this and the iOS solution would just be "use device settings lol"

chillfox
Android development is definitely insane. Just the process for getting a dev environment setup is stupidly complicated compared to almost anything else.
mtnGoat
So… similar to setting up a dev environment at most FAANGs? ;)
westurner
/? termux USB webcam: https://www.google.com/search?q=termux+usb+webcam

Termux was F-droid only, but 4 years later is back on the Play Store: https://github.com/termux-play-store#current-status-for-user...

Termux has both glibc and musl libc. Android has bionic libc.

One time I got JupyterLab to run on Android in termux with `proot` and pip. And then the mobile UI needed work in a WebView app or just a browser tab t. Maybe things would port back from Colab to JupyterLab.

conda-forge and Linux arm64 packages don't work on arm64 Android devices, so the only option is to install the *-dev dependencies and wait for compilation to finish on the Android device.

Waydroid is one way to work with Android APKs in a guest container on a Linux host.

That Android Studio doesn't work on Android or ChromiumOS without containers (that students can't have either).

llm_trw
When you get x on turmux working you see what mobile development could have been and weep for the fallen world we live in.
westurner
containers/podman > [Feature]: Android support: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/17717 :

> There are docker and containerd in termux-packages. https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/root-p...

But Android 13+ supports rootless pKVM VMs, which podman-machine should be able to run containers in; (but only APK-installed binaries are blessed with the necessary extended filesystem attributes to exec on Android 4.4+ with SELinux in enforcing mode.)

- Android pKVM: https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architec... :

> qemu + pKVM + podman-machine:

> The protected kernel-based virtual machine (pKVM) is built upon the Linux KVM hypervisor, which has been extended with the ability to restrict access to the payloads running in guest virtual machines marked ‘protected’ at the time of creation.

> KVM/arm64 supports different execution modes depending on the availability of certain CPU features, namely, the Virtualization Host Extensions (VHE) (ARMv8.1 and later).

- "Android 13 virtualization lets [Pixel >= 6] run Windows 11, Linux distributions" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30328692

It's faster to keep a minimal container hosting VM updated.

So, podman-machine for Android in Termux might help solve for development UX on Android (and e.g. Android Studio on Android).

podman-machine: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-machine.1.h...

sgammon
Kotlin is a dream. I literally love writing it.
brutus1213
Back when I was in undergrad, I recall how I was taught C. Just read one of the bible books on a weekend, and was ready to go. I was recently taking a look at Kotlin books and literally banged my head on the table. I realized the language has a good rap but it is ridiculously feature-laden .. to the point they threw in the kitchen sink. A key positive of languages is easiness to learn. I really wonder about Kotlin. It may be well-designed, but did it really need to be so big?

I'm also curious if it is just me. I am a grey hair now, with many other responsibilities. Why were C, Python and Go so easy for me when kotlin seems so hard to penetrate (for me)? Is there a way to quantify language complexity?

sgammon
What do you mean "so big?" Kotlin doesn't feel "big" to me.

`

enum class Sample { A, B }

val x: Sample = Sample.A

val y = when (x) {

  Sample.A → 0

  Sample.B → 1
}

`

I think if you give it time you might like it. It takes some getting used to, sure, but especially compared with the alternatives (Java to use JVM, Java on Android, etc) it's pretty great.

Cross-platform Kotlin is very new but it works surprisingly well.

sgammon
I will also say: Android Kotlin and pure server Kotlin are entirely different beasts. If you are on Android and you are frustrated with Kotlin, it is probably Android.

Kotlin compiles now to JS, WASM... even LLVM bitcode if you want it to. Coming to Kotlin from a pure lang perspective, I'm not sure what it would be like, it might not be you. I know as someone who came to it through Java that it is a massive improvement on what I had before.

lookdangerous
I found Kotlin easy to pick up, and use, but there are always complicated parts of it I haven't yet grokked. I'm sure a working knowledge of it is easy to obtain but I'm with you on the more dense pieces.
WkndTriathlete
Not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Take the K&R C book. It describes the language itself only - not the standard library. The Kotlin docs describe the language _plus_ parts of the Kotlin standard library which is why it appears to have lots of features. You'd have to read through half the standard C library documentation & pthreads docs in addition to K&R C to get the equivalent experience.

sgammon
Can't imagine who would downvote this comment as I'm definitely not claiming that _you_ need to like Kotlin, or that _your_ language is bad. I just like Kotlin. Sorry! :)
yen223
Kotlin + Jetpack Compose is my absolute favourite way to build apps.

Jetpack Compose feels underrated around here. It basically has most of the upsides of React, but with far fewer downsides. If it weren't for the fact that it's basically Android-only[0], I would probably stick to Kotlin for all my side projects.

[0] I know there's Compose Multiplatform, but I don't trust cross-platform compilation to be reliable.

kevmo314
Getting native libraries to work well on Android is a beast. I happened to have done exactly what you're describing though, specifically rendering libusb through an Android phone. My code is at https://github.com/kevmo314/kineticstreamer and you might be particularly interested in the CMake build at https://github.com/kevmo314/kineticstreamer/blob/main/app/sr...

Happy to answer any questions or help you out if you decide to keep going down this road, shoot me an email at kevmo314@gmail.com. Ultimately an Android phone is still just a Linux computer but jumping through the hoops is definitely hard.

ssahoo
It's not that awful once you get hang of it, but it's a mess made by google. Kotlin which is maintained Jetbrain is catching up. Google is far less interested in owning kotlin. Therefore creating a confusion with mix of grovy, maven, java and xml as hell.
iiJDSii
Hey thanks for this! I gave it a try, imported and built in my Android Studio ("Koala" if that matters), tried getting it installed on a phone, and unfortunately got this cryptic error:

> ninja: error: 'lib/libjpeg.so', needed by 'C:/Users/ADMIN/AndroidStudioProjects/kineticstreamer/app/build/intermediates/cxx/Debug/3xf5p505/obj/arm64-v8a/libkinetic.so', missing and no known rule to make it

That being said, I browsed through the code some more and while I think it's a great Android project, I don't think (assuming I got it working) it would be advisable for me to build on top of this. The existing complexity, and my lack of faith on cross-compatibility (different phones, SDK updates, etc) are a turn off. Heck I've even seen certain libraries and includes fail because they require different versions of Java/JDK that I have available.

So in summary, I think the solution for myself at least for now, will be to explore a different hardware route. A cheap raspberry pi equivalent, with a small display, and battery - annoying to have all these extra components but at least I know it'll work reliably.

rasz
>got this cryptic error:

> 'lib/libjpeg.so' missing

whats cryptic about that?

WkndTriathlete
I get the sense that the only development environment the OP knows at all is Python. With that perspective I understand why they might think that error is cryptic.
stefan_
You are just trying to do something that nobody cares about making work on smartphones, and so you are "on your own".

Trying to do userland USB in an Android app to talk to a UVC webcam connected through USB OTG is not something even a niche of apps care for, and the native camera framework definitely doesn't care about because if it was trying to workaround the UVC spec Android phone cameras would have never left the original Gameboy camera age.

So with no native support for your use case, you are now having to wrangle the pretty shitty libusb and the even more terrible libuvc in working within the confines of an Android app. And to the credit of Android, this is possible! People have made it work! People with in depth knowledge of how the parts fit together, that is, and so GPT won't be of any help.

giantg2
"Using Python scripting and OpenCV, I had a working cross-compatible script in 10 minutes, for both Linux and Windows."

What took you 10 minutes would take me a long time to learn. I rather enjoyed making some basic Android apps. I didn't work with much hardware stuff and heard that part is tough due to all the variations.

iiJDSii
Appreciate the ego boost, but it was literally some modifications to python opencv demos available on their webpage. But that's what's amazing, it was up and running so fast and worked cross-platform after 5 minutes of debugging something with ChatGPT.

Yes it's become quite clear to me that using an Android phone is not a good development platform to work with external hardware devices. I understand this has never been it's intended purpose, but come on, we have a linux kernel sitting under the hood. Just feels like a waste of potential.

giantg2
Why use external hardware when they have cameras built in? I'm sure you could find an example or open source app that uses the camera and just modify that, like you did with the openCV.
danpalmer
There's a bigger issue here: OP describes writing prototype software on a desktop, and compares this to writing more production-style software on a highly constrained mobile device. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

Python packaging is notoriously bad, and while you can get a Linux/Windows compatible script without too much work, getting to a single executable that just runs is much harder. Cloning a repo, setting up a virtualenv, installing an openssl dependendcy or whatever, is just not something that exists in the mobile world. We have to put more effort into the packaging, and that means a higher bar for things like this. There are answers to this in Python that claim to produce single, relocatable, Python binaries, and I've never seen one without a huge list of caveats. Even yesterday I was patching an open source library that didn't work inside one of these because it had the gaul to use... checks notes, os.path.

> Well, looks like modern mobile phones are not a great hacker's playground, huh?

This sums it up. They are not. The security environment on these devices pretty much ends this before you even get to writing any code, and that's generally a good thing. Phones are appliances for most people. There's a reason why "apps" took off in a way that boxed desktop software never did, and there's a reason why boxed desktop software on Windows did far better than package managers on Linux. Almost everyone wants more a more polished experience. Shipping a Python script running OpenCV to a phone is not going to produce a polished experience.

brrrrrm
amazingly, the browser has pretty much solved all of this. fully compatible EMCAscript implementations on every single device with hardware access (such as the camera, as is needed in this post)

I don't buy your "security through difficulty" argument for that reason alone.

danpalmer
I don't really mean "security through difficulty", I mean that on phones we have sandboxing, permissions, and a bunch of other factors that make phones much more secure than the average desktop/laptop. Browsers do provide a pretty good option here, but that comes at the cost of the browsers themselves being highly complex, and privileged software on the devices.

OP writing this prototype as a web app would likely have been the path of least resistance to having something work on mobile.

eqvinox
I'd argue they were trying to do prototype software for Android as well, and that's not a thing you can do. Which is the problem...
qiqitori 

    10 Install an app that is able to use UVC cameras
    20 If works goto 50
    30 Else Use a different phone and goto 10
    50 Find an open-source app that is able to use UVC cameras
    60 If it doesn't work goto 50 (find another app)
    70 Try compiling the open-source app
    80 If it works goto 150
    90 ???
    150 Reduce open-source app to minimum code necessary
    160 Add own code
    170 Make sure the phone doesn't overheat and/or develop a bloated battery when you leave it running for weeks and weeks
drpixie
Strong agree - it's horrible. I can't get past the enormous amount of boilerplate code that's required to do anything - even the proverbial Hello World.
nicebyte
Take it from someone who has worked on android dev tools - yes.
JackYoustra
Try using Expo! I've found it to be much easier than native development on either platform, and its fairly easy to move through if you know web stuff.
johnklos
I remember asking some Android devs, "How do I install a compiler on Android?"

They proceeded to tell me what to download on my laptop. I repeated my question, emphasizing "ON Android". They gave me blank looks. I said, "I want to install a toolchain ON an Android device, and run it there. How do I do that?"

They had no idea.

I asked, "What if you want to compile something that requires compiling something, then using that something further down the line, like Perl?"

Again, no idea.

A platform without a native toolchain is a very awkward place to be. I stopped trying to wrap my head around it and stopped playing with Android.

stevenhuang
Sounds like an X Y problem.

What you want is to cross compile using the NDK toolchain. That should get you 95% of the way there (barring tweaking with downstream project flags to work with bionic libc and limited Android user land and other Android idiosyncrasies)

johnklos
What I really want (or wanted, I should say) is a native toolchain that runs on the Android device, not a cross toolchain that runs elsewhere. NDK isn't that.
jsight
To me it just sounds like you want Termux. It works pretty well for things like gcc, Python, or Perl.

For fun, I managed to get a full X environment running, including Intellij! The amazing thing was that it actually ran fairly decently on a Pixel 5, though it did tend to run out of memory with anything more than trivial projects.

johnklos
This looks like exactly what I wanted to find! Thank you.

I had been soured by the Android platform because I bought a brand new device, mostly because it had a physical keyboard, only to find out that it wouldn't get any new updates, nor could I use Skype on it, nor could I tether with it. Android was supposed to be the "open" platform, but at the time (which, admittedly, was something like ten or so years ago), it wasn't.

If I can use Termux to get a modern OpenSSH on to my device, it may get used yet! Thank you :)

HPsquared
You can indeed use SSH. As client OR server.
cylinder714
"Toybox's main goal is to make Android self-hosting by improving Android's command line utilities so it can build an installable Android Open Source Project image entirely from source under a stock Android system. After a talk at the 2013 Embedded Linux Conference explaining this plan, Google merged toybox into AOSP and began shipping toybox in Android Marshmallow in 2015." --Rob Landley

http://landley.net/toybox/

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lawgimenez
Started Android development back in 2011, Android SDK was just a plugin for Eclipse back then. It's way better now compared to before. Does anyone remember Ant, it was way worse.

But I feel you, if you don't have enough experience dealing with different Android, Gradle, AS errors then you're really having a bad day. But shouldn't be a deal breaker, just give it some time and more familiarity.

crossroadsguy
It is pathetic. I have been an Android developer for more than a decade and some aspects of it have become shittier. One of the other, seems tangential problems, in Android development world is architecture fatigue. Every other week the cool kids will change to something else and everything else becomes "so old school". For what? No one knows. It's just because the upstream (i.e. famous) cool kids are doing that. One blog post or even tweet by them and your junior teammates indignantly start demanding we must rewrite the whole codebase to the new holy tunes. Then there are libraries. In a way that is great that we have so many libs especially compared to iOS dev world. But then even small tasks means someone just added a library and you have a hard time explaining that just because there is a library doesn't mean you should add it without thinking of the implications and maybe not at all add it if all you have to do add a bit of code on your own for a tiny task.

If you ever have to work with native code (or things like OpenCV) start praying from day one and never stop.

You need bigger and bigger laptops to even run that disgrace of an IDE Android Studio. This always gets me!

So dev tools/env? Oh, god! Fuck Google!

ivm
Coming from iOS development, it was incredibly frustrating not to have an event for software keyboard appearance/disappearance. I tried researching the issue and ended up in Google Groups, where an official Google representative was smugly telling the developers that they did not need such a feature to make Android apps.
crossroadsguy
Ah, those Google Groups where you are made to feel like an idiot for just reporting an issue and then few centuries later someone with some @google.com email comes and says something completely unrelated and closes it.
gsky
I enjoyed building Android apps using flutter framework but never touched the native though