(2018-03-13) Yegge Who Will Steal Android From Google

Steve Yegge: Who will steal Android from Google?

Why does everyone need mobile devs? Because the web is slowly dying

Android’s dev stack is the world’s biggest poo sandwich.

Programming Android for a huge app like Google Maps or Facebook or Snapchat is… just… I mean you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Sitting there for twenty minutes to wait to see what happens after you change one line of code. And every change you make, no matter how tiny, has an 80% chance of not working the first time you try it, because the feature interoperability matrix is bizarrely sparse.

So here’s what has happened: A bunch of competitors, big and small, have come out with their own replacement Android frameworks. I’m not just talking about support libraries for missing functionality, though those exist aplenty. No. I am talking about full-scale replacements for Google’s entire Android development stack. Microsoft has Xamarin, Adobe has Cordova, Facebook has React Native,

The thing about these dev frameworks is that they make Google vulnerable. Most of them are cross-platform, which means you write a single app and it runs on both iOS and Android.

If you are an Android or iOS developer, and you take some time to try React Native (which Facebook created to help address these problems), you’ll realize within about 30 seconds that it’s WAY better, assuming you’re not writing a game, in which case you’d probably use Unity anyway.

To make matters worse, the development stack isn’t the only assault happening on Android. There are other ways that someone might “steal” Android from Google. One approach is to create a more successful store.

guess who else is making a big play with a competing AppStore? You guessed it: Jeff Bezos

And as if that weren’t enough for Google to worry about, there is a third assault on Android, and this one is hitting right where it hurts: In the Ads.

Facebook’s Android app

WeChat is doing exactly the same thing in China.

Let’s be clear: The only reason Google created Android was because it’s an ad channel.

Whenever you see a company like Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft mysteriously get into a strange new business, you can bet it’s a channel play.

The bottom line is, companies want you viewing your favorite content (books, movies, games, Natalie Portman sex columns) though their channel rather than someone else’s, so that they can get the ad revenue, or at least its little sister, subscription revenue.

Android is probably Google’s most important channel — if not today, then certainly over the next ten years.

It actually affects us down on the ground here at Grab because we have to make important decisions about what technology stacks to use for our mobile apps,

Among the cross-platform options, React Native is looking like a winner.

regardless of your flavor of choice, it’s a good time to be a mobile developer. If you’re a non-mobile dev, you should consider switching tracks for a while. Starting with backend experience and learning mobile development turns you into a “full stack developer”, which is an even rarer and more marketable unicorn.