Until a few weeks ago, I had never spent much time in the android developer docs. I’ve always used Titanium or PhoneGap (or, in the glory days, native webOS) when building mobile apps, so I’ve never really needed much from the android docs. But the other day, I started to build a Titanium Module that uses the Chromecast SDK, and found out just how insanely complex the android docs are.
It started out simple enough. I clicked on the Developer’s Guide link on the Chromecast SDK homepage. I should’ve known what I was getting into as soon as I landed on the Dev Guide page. It has an introduction with with links to 11 other pages of info, and then a “Get Started” list with 5 steps. Great! 5 simple steps, eh? I’ll be up and running in no time!
Oh wait.
As part of those 5 steps, there are 9 links to other pages, each of which has it’s own lists of steps, which in turn have their own links to other pages. I spent 3 days in this loop of infinite recursion before throwing my own “out of memory” exception. And to make matters worse, this maze of documentation often times contradicts itself. My personal favorite scenario is when I’d find 2 different pages, both explaining the same process, but with different steps to follow. Which one was right? Who knows!
Don’t get me wrong … given a choice of too much documentation or too little, I’ll go for too much every time. No developer enjoys the situation where you find yourself needing to use an API that has NO documentation at all. So, I’m grateful for all that Google provides for Android, I’ll never want for bathroom reading material again. I just wish they’d give me a tl;dr or something.