Recorded – watch the full episode on YouTube.
How did you keep feature parity between iOS and Android when working on VLC? That was a huge application presumably with a very large core of cross-platform media code, but how did you make sure you retained feature parity when working on two very large apps across platforms?
Carola Nitz: I didn't work on the Android part, but with feature parity usually you have one platform go first when you have something new because it could work out any kinks – figuring out how something should actually work with the core library that we have, and any edge cases that somebody didn't think about. And then you have the second platform just adopt that new feature as well if that makes sense.
Paul Hudson: And which one was the guinea pig?
Carola Nitz: It was actually always Android!
Paul Hudson: Of course it was.
Carola Nitz: We just had more developers on it to be honest. Yeah we didn't have that many MacBooks and iOS developers and they were all always like, “no, I want to work more with Java." I don't know why. Maybe because we still had a lot of brackets and they're like, "I don't know how this language works, Objective-C is so weird!”
Paul Hudson: That's obviously part of the problem – if they look at Java it did look more modern at the time compared to Objective-C even though I preferred Objective-C because I have perhaps got Stockholm syndrome! At the time Java looked a good bet.
This transcript was recorded as part of Swiftly Speaking. You can watch the full original episode on YouTube, or subscribe to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.
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