[habosa]

I've been doing Android development for ~6 years now. For the last 2 years I've been doing it full time at Google (not on the Android team).

Your first impression is correct. There is a LOT to know and I am still learning new bits every day. And yes you do find most of it out by digging around in the docs or on StackOverflow.

That said, it's an amazing platform to explore because no door is fully closed. Android will let you do practically anything if the user wants you to. That leads to a really gratifying hacking experience where if you just keep digging you can achieve really fun and crazy things that you'd never be able to do on any other platform while working with mostly high-level APIs. It has its own strange logic that I have grown to love.

[cguess]

That's true, as long as you don't have to support >50% of the users of Android. As someone (at this moment) still dealing with the very healthy supply of Android 4.4 phones being sold as "new" in Europe, I can only dream about actually using the fancy APIs someday.

Apple may be closed down, but I've never had to target anything less than current_version-1.

[passivepinetree]

Can you offer some examples?

[habosa]

Sure. My personal favorite example of an app that would only work on Android is Link Bubble [0]. Not only is the UI creative but it makes amazing use of Android extensive Intent-based sharing system, which is the one thing Android had right from the start.

Google also maintains a whole page of creative Android apps [1].

[0] - http://linkbubble.com

[1] - https://www.androidexperiments.com