Hi there, I recently posted about a list of the tools I tried to develop apps for mobiles. I'm happy with my latest personal choice for many reasons. Anyway during my attempts and short experience I'm still surprised by the so many MBs I downloades, it was a lot.
Desktop:if we want to develop for one platform, less than 400MB are more than enough. Even if we want to develop for more than one platform there are tools that allow you this (win, mac, linux) under 500MB. Sure, there are some that demand even less, some even more but that's just a regular size that I've seen in my personal experience developing for diff platforms.
Mobile...this is what I don't understand. Any tool for development and from start you face a 100-200MB download (except from Basic for Android). This is about win, ios, android, etc. And we are mostly talking about weird tools with a text like editor, only very few offer a graphical interface for object oriented programming (still talking about multi platform).
It get worse, for most of the tools if you need Android you must download other stuff, and other stuff. If you want to develop for Android and IOS then you must download even more stuff. There is not a single one solution that comes ready out of the box (or so it seems to me). It seems you end up with at least 1G minimum of downloads to finally get started with multi platform development.
Call me naive but it's funny the amount of data and tools we must download so we can develop 1 to 5mb apps...
