FTA: Indeed. Intents are powerful. The problem is that they give you power that you don't need the vast majority of the time in the vast majority of applications.
This is silly, and tells me the author didn't think past the SDK. The Intent framework is what allows me to take a photo with the regular camera app (the one that pops up when I press the shutter button) and select "Facebook" from the "Share" menu. The Facebook app hooks up automatically. The iPhone app has to have its own "take photo" gadget, otherwise you end up having to browse through your photos trying to find the one you just took. This kind of integration is everywhere in Android.
That said, some of the other complaints are spot on. It's absolutely true that the amount of "dumb XML boilerplate" in Android is too high, and there are a bunch of tasks and states that can only be accessed through static configuration, and not managed dynamically by the app. Likewise the application lifecycle (which is inherently more complicated on Android because of the ability to run in the background) is more complicated than it needs to be, and frankly poorly documented. On the whole it's an OK framework; it's not great.
Of course he thinks you don't need the extra power provided by intents. This is the same guy who thought it's a bad thing that the Nexus One has a better resolution than the iPhone. Unbiased he's not. It'll be interesting to see how he's gonna respond if the next gen iPhone has a higher resolution screen. :-)
Yes, and there's already a reasonably simple path. If you just want to switch to a new screen (say, an "about" view) and don't need to be notified when it exits, you just add the new Activity in AndroidManifest.xml, create a NewActivity class, and call "startActivity(new Intent(this, NewActivity.class))". The extra steps he describes are only relevant if you need to pass in additional data, or get a callback when it exits, and you'd need extra code to handle that for the iPhone as well.
This is silly, and tells me the author didn't think past the SDK. The Intent framework is what allows me to take a photo with the regular camera app (the one that pops up when I press the shutter button) and select "Facebook" from the "Share" menu. The Facebook app hooks up automatically. The iPhone app has to have its own "take photo" gadget, otherwise you end up having to browse through your photos trying to find the one you just took. This kind of integration is everywhere in Android.
That said, some of the other complaints are spot on. It's absolutely true that the amount of "dumb XML boilerplate" in Android is too high, and there are a bunch of tasks and states that can only be accessed through static configuration, and not managed dynamically by the app. Likewise the application lifecycle (which is inherently more complicated on Android because of the ability to run in the background) is more complicated than it needs to be, and frankly poorly documented. On the whole it's an OK framework; it's not great.