how would you describe the difference between developing android apps and "regular" programming such as full-stack development or even just backend?

interesting; I always thought of android as being far closer to "regular" programming than web or backend/server 🙂

i guess to clarify i meant "regular" as in what seems to be the most common type of programming job (or at least what it seems like to me)

process lifecycle is quite a bit different but not hugely dissimilar from that of a browser tab in that it can get closed at any time and you're responsible for providing a good UX when it reopens again

To me difference between Android and backend development is mostly that when writing Android apps you only deal with Android framework, while on the backend you have much more flexibility in choosing the framework and infrastructure to achieve what you need. Seems like backend has tons of solutions for things like caching of some other source of truth, while on Android we’re pretty limited in terms of what framework lets us do

how so?

😄 It’s tough to explain what I mean, maybe because I haven’t done any serious backend development, so I might not have it right. My point is that Android is a framework, while on backend you get to choose the framework + there’s a ton more problems to solve like scaling, data consistency across nodes, scaling some more, communication between many services and so on. On Android there seems to be less choice

eh, Android doesn't really use the word, "framework" the way anyone else does 😄 what Android calls its framework is more like a runtime library; it imposes some physics of the universe more than it does architectural choices

Sure, but in that case just replace ‘framework’ with ‘runtime’ in what I wrote, and I still mean it 😄 On backend you can choose the architecture and the runtime (not to mention programming language). When writing the same app, backend + Android frontend, I believe backend will have a lot more decisions to make.

kind of an apples to oranges definition there though; if you're writing backend code you probably have some sort of environment in mind; linux, docker, k8s, jvm, aws, etc etc and those choices affect your deployment options. Similarly you can talk about, "mobile development" at which point Android or iOS is kind of analogous

That’s all true and nicely put. In the end I suppose that’s the difference I meant, once you’re writing an Android app, these environment, framework etc. choices have been already made for you