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by cnbuff410 3693 days ago
One thing platform engineer should do is to rotate into app engineer role and experience it for a couple month at least, without doing it you don't really understand all the pains the app engineers are suffering due to platform design. At very least you can make your doc so much better by knowing which part you absolutely want to cover in details.

This is especially true for Android platform team, to be honest.
2 comments
spriggan3 3693 days ago
What a platform engineer needs to do is to listen user's feedback early and often in order to improve the API. An API is a product,and like every products there should be usability concerns. I wouldn't say Android SDK is bad, it's just so convoluted it doesn't feel like it was written in this century.

It's like someone wanted to impose something regardless of its usability, a lot of design decisions seem to have been taken unilaterally because of one engineer's ego.

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taneq 3693 days ago
Dogfood, you say? I concur. I've only dabbled in Android development but (while a lot of things do feel well designed) there are some ridiculous design choices in there.

The one thing I've found really annoying is instability of the API as new versions are churned out. New features are added, deprecated almost immediately, and replaced with entirely different things (looking at you, NotificationListenerService!) It feels like they're thrashing trying to hit feature quotas or something.

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