*Record Scratch**Freeze Frame*
Yup, that’s me holding a Google Pixel 2. If you know me at all, you’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.
I’ve been developing iOS apps and the occasional macOS app now for 10 years. I’ve immersed myself in the ecosystem, love it, and I’m not stopping. However, when an opportunity arose recently at the day job to work on an Android app, I was intrigued.
I’d looked at Android development from time to time, but it’s only recently that I thought it would be something I wanted to spend the time to learn.
For May 2018, I’m diving deep into Android. The reasons I said yes now are:
- Android Studio
- It’s Not Eclipse™
- Still not a good native macOS app by any stretch of the imagination
- Kotlin
- It’s very Swift-like
- Kotlin Native - iOS, macOS, and WebAssembly are all target platforms
- Needed something developer wise to learn this year
- Learned Ruby on Rails last year
- Theory that Google and Apple had cross pollinated enough ideas that learning Android development would be incremental over iOS
- It’s early days, but this theory is looking decent.
- e.g. ViewController on iOS is an Activity on Android
- Also, leveled up Git, Bash shell scripting, and Unix in 2017, all those skills would help with Android