I started the official Android course with Kotlin and was very pleased with the first unit which went over the basics of Kotlin. It was very beginner friendly, written well, and a lot of reminders and general hand holding. I also have some prior coding experience.

The second unit on Android was the complete opposite experience. It was written by a non-native English speaker and the instructions were dry and not very clear.

I now understand why some people warned that learning Kotlin means fewer resources to learn from compared to Java where there are many to choose from. So it’s made me consider: should I switch to a Java Android course with the hope that the Android portion of the course will be better developed? Or should I just stick with the Kotlin course because it will be difficult either way?

Also, has anyone else new to coding/android development had success learning with the official Kotlin Android course?

  • lemmysmash@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    20 days ago

    I’ve used both for some side-projects. Both are hell when it comes to Android because Android itself is one hell of a spaghetti.

    To me, the hardest part was not the language itself but the fact that many things you find (including in the most official Android docs!) are quite outdated — both for Java and Kotlin.

    And then you do circles and circles searching the web. Then you end up upgrading some of the dependencies or the SDK itself, and here another bunch of your dependencies stops working…

    So no clear winner or loser for me. In the end they both seem to be almost identical, especially when it comes to Android APIs (apart from tons of generic boilerplate code that Kotlin wraps in cool concepts of flows, coroutines and so on).

    There’s indeed more decent documentation for Java, but most of the new code (starting from Google itself) seems to be coming out mostly in Kotlin, so I wouldn’t advise against learning it, you probably will need it anyway at some point.