Our experiences do not match. I used Borland Delphi to build business apps 20 years ago just using the UI builder. I've been using Android Studio to build apps at FAANGs for 10 years now and I cannot remember the last time the Design tab was useful - it was always faster and more reliable to just edit the XML file.
Yes, Delphi didn't do resizing windows and crashed half the time, but I was pretty happy with the WYSIWYG / UI building functionality for production apps.
Android Studio's UI builder is nowhere near that level of usefulness. I have a hard time believing anyone is using the UI builder in Android Studio for anything other than tutorials or entry level Android apps. It doesn't render the layout properly 90% of the time, or just renders some placeholders with no content and calls it a day.
For a modern IDE, Android Studio is somewhere between just OK and bad, mostly because it has features the other IDEs didn't at the time, but the dev experience is behind Turbo Pascal in the 90s on MS DOS. The editor is laggy. The debugger is slow and hangs often. The list goes on, but I'll stop the rant here.
Android Studio had the exact WYSIWYG experience other toolkits used to have, it was just hidden behind an <AbsoluteLayout> because designing mobile applications the way desktop applications used to be designed is an awful idea.
Drop an AbsoluteLayout into a design and you can drag, drop, and resize buttons to your hearts' content. You'd have the same problem with VB6 where your buttons would fall off the screen if someone ran your application at a lower resolution than you designed it for, but that was never a problem for the desktop designer.
For the same reason dumping buttons on an arbitrary coordinate and resizing by eye is no longer acceptable on desktop, that same ease of design died out in Android for any serious application developer. It stuck around a while longer on desktop, unfortunately, but modern frameworks pretty much all use declarative layouts these days.
Our experiences do not match. I used Borland Delphi to build business apps 20 years ago just using the UI builder. I've been using Android Studio to build apps at FAANGs for 10 years now and I cannot remember the last time the Design tab was useful - it was always faster and more reliable to just edit the XML file.
Yes, Delphi didn't do resizing windows and crashed half the time, but I was pretty happy with the WYSIWYG / UI building functionality for production apps.
Android Studio's UI builder is nowhere near that level of usefulness. I have a hard time believing anyone is using the UI builder in Android Studio for anything other than tutorials or entry level Android apps. It doesn't render the layout properly 90% of the time, or just renders some placeholders with no content and calls it a day.
For a modern IDE, Android Studio is somewhere between just OK and bad, mostly because it has features the other IDEs didn't at the time, but the dev experience is behind Turbo Pascal in the 90s on MS DOS. The editor is laggy. The debugger is slow and hangs often. The list goes on, but I'll stop the rant here.