i am writing my bachelor thesis on mobile platform fragmentation and comparing a couple of solutions. so i've written a very basic sample application in android, then in phonegap, then in rhomobile, then in titanium... and i have to say, the experience was quite shocking...

i am used to develop webapps in rails+backbone, so i'm pretty spoiled when it comes to debugging tools. debugging webapps with the rails console and chrome's awesome javascript console is a freaking JOY.

maybe i am doing something wrong when my app chrashes or doesnt even start, and all i see in androids logcat is a bunch of random messages and nothing helpful at all.

maybe i am doing something wrong when everytime i want my code changes to take effect i have to close the emulator then project->clean, project->refresh, projekt->debug and wait 2 minutes until the emulator starts up again.

i actually WANT to believe that i'm still doing something wrong, and somehow i missed something (even though i read a ton of articles about debugging android applications) ... because right now, developing anything that needs an emulator to debug, makes me want to jump out of the window...

so my question is, are there any android developers who figured this out and actually enjoy building mobile apps?

and how is ios development compared to that?