Delphi mobile development gripes

[DP News-Robot]

This post is going to be a bit of a rant, but hopefully a useful one. Mobile development would benefit greatly from a stable, simple, future proof multi-platform IDE and framework and tools of some kind.

It's a great shame that this sort of thing doesn't exist. You see, there's an essential complexity element, and an accidental complexity element in mobile development, and here's the problem




1. The two big mobile platforms are endlessly mutating, each away from its own previous iterations. iOS moves faster and breaks more often, and Apple adds onerous new hoops to jump through more frequently than Google, but both, mostly driven by security and a desire to improve the overall quality of their app ecosystems, add more and more burdens, as years roll on.

2. The two platforms each require tools which change frequently. Google's worse in this regards, as the various levels of Android SDKs and tools, and their quirks, will attest.




Delphi, and FMX (Firemonkey) are noble attempts, but they are not winning significant traction in the market with the product, and it's not hard to say why. It's been an incredibly hard uphill battle to fight with Apple, and Google, and then build a native code compilation system (Delphi loves to be native to an instruction set for a single CPU) that will never be really at home in the Android dalvik-vm centric world. Native compilation to ARM is a better fit for iOS but the native Cocoa APIs are not easily interfaced to Delphi apps, and forever there is a need for a series of complex wrappers to make iOS development with Delphi and FMX feasible.

I spent most of the last two days trying to figure out a quirk that only occurs on Delphi 12.1, and does not occur on Delphi 12.2, which I can't safely fix by moving an entire product to Delphi 12.2, because of potential regressions in Delphi 12.2, and which is completely inscrutable. The problem is not yet solved, and as I write this I'm reinstalling a delphi version on a different PC for the third time.

The latest small frustration? The delphi 12.0, 12.1 and 12.2 installers have a habit of not installing the android-tools even when the installer is told to install the SDK or the android platform.




The delphi app in question is failing to start and the android parent launcher process is attempting to relaunch it. The only information visible is found by using Android Studio's ADB LOGCAT support, filtered to the bundle id of the mobile app to get the following repeating errors that libc is raising at startup, with a permission read in a bundle resource. Googling and stack overflow searches come up blank.

And this in the end is the problem with not going with Android Studio, being all alone on your own tiny little sub-platform of the Android platform, and that in the end, is why I do not believe that Delphi FMX has a long term future, on any platform. The fragmentation, the technical risk, the quirks, the bugs, there are no solutions for tiny niche commercial systems. The market will kill it.












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