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Same thing with XCode. I'd love a mobile app development pipeline that lets me never use either Android Studio or XCode. Let me drive everything with scripts and/or VSCode extensions.


Isn't flutter (especially including the flutter rust bridge), achieving that? You do need Android Studio and XCode installed on your machine but you don't have to interact with them directly.


As someone interested in flutter, when do you have to use XCode and Android Studio?


The only times I’ve had to use Xcode for my flutter app is configuring some things related to signing and distribution. There hasn’t been anything that required Android Studio except for setting up emulators.


I develop an app with flutter on Mac OS. I open xcode when creating a new project to setup signing. I never installed Android studio since I use an Android device for testing and just use the command line tools and SDK (setting this up without android studio was a bit of pain and probably not worth it but still it proves that it's possible).

All development work takes place in VS code, including the incredibly incredibly convenient and performant hot code reload, as well as the final step of "flutter build ios"/"flutter build aab"

It is an experience with very few pain points* and I find it to be very enjoyable.

*except for the random Cocoa Pods error every few months which can be solved by random helpless googling and then deleting the podfile.lock


If only Firefox OS had taken off...


XCode is awful but JetBrains makes the best IDEs. There are people that dislike all IDEs which I disagree with but understand.

VSCode isn't bad but disliking Android Studio just feels like you started with it and didn't want to learn a different tool.


Jetbrains makes great stuff, I only wish their remote development story was better. You basically have to run a full headless instance on the remote and since it's all java it requires way more ram resources than it should.


Try give a look at kraken: https://github.com/sal0max/kraken

It's a native Android app (Kotlin) which isn't developed using Android Studio. Gradle only.


Give ReactNative + Expo a try




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