An ex android developer here who spent 7 years in Android and moved to cloud 5 years ago and don't missing anything about Android.
The innovative period of Android Development where you can do anything is gone forever because of greedy corporations who can get away with any abuse in the system. And many of those "new" APIs are not being implemented, either not encouraged by business or the teams not aware about those features. Since the launch, I have developed and seen development of apps implementing shortcuts are exact 2, I have seen 12-14 apps being developed and launched with more than 7 screens and 8 defined workflows in that period and they are yet to develop a widget, a shortcut and they spent 2-3 versions in prod (with heavy marketing) without dark themes. This story is more or less same with every user facing features. Thus making more then half of the apps are just websites written in Kotlin instead of any JS frameworks. Atleast websites don't fight with Play Store and the restrictive policies.
Plus the confusing era of Google isn't helping anyone. I haven't seen excitement around any product and ecosystem launched since 2018 except flutter and Firebase. Assistant, Instant Apps there are many "launches" which are almost dead on arrival. For long Google is like a startup who sees what sticks on the wall, and wind down the others, except the OTHERs have no ecosystem and winding down affects hundreds of developers and thousands of users. Which is affecting android too.
"I haven't seen excitement around any product and ecosystem launched since 2018 except flutter and Firebase."
Hard disagree, lol. Android Jetpack was launched in 2018. It was basically the second generation of Android development, it was a proper "tech stack" instead of everyone cobbling together third party libraries. Architectures switched over to the one true MVVM, instead of being this mess of MVC, MVP, etc.
Jetpack Compose is pretty amazing, it cut down our LOC by about half because we don't need adapters for every list. Kotlin coroutines & flow is nice. You get reactive programming, no more complex nested if/else conditions. We're not using Fragments or Activities much now either, navigation is via Compose, meaning DI is less necessary. So builds can be much faster too with a 2023 stack, and you can get UI changes rendered in the emulator immediately without even needing to update the build.
No? I mean, there is an entire market of phones out there using apps. Do you know something we don't that would imply a massive amount of android users stopped using their Android apps?
I can't pinpoint the latest stats, but it seems like most people are only using certain top X apps and no longer discovering new ones. I'm hoping that someone else will be able to post it here.
The novelty of "magic rectangle" is wearing off (for the billion+ people exposed to it in the last eight years), so people are more likely to spend less time on it, seclude themselves to a few chosen apps, and if they have enough money, start focusing on status and buying apple instead.
I'm happy for you, but isn't this more or less like a dive into the sea, like the early 2000 web page era? It is my belief that every front end will eventually disappear and become a part of the Chat*-Plugin at the most. In the long term, AI will use a template that it believes is appropriate for the user to display the data. If the user is dissatisfied with the template, it will suggest multiple new ones with a storage option for future use.
OK, but that isn't the world yet, so unless AI templating is your passion and that's the product you wish to deliver it's more important to focus on the industry trends right now.
Most people expect platform agnosticism for just about anything mobile now. react native is the soup du jour, and it works fine. Plenty of work out there for anyone familiar with it, and it is one of the many reasons why "ANDROID DEVELOPER" and "APPLE DEVELOPER" titles are going the way of the dodo.
But.. the way you directed that comment just makes me think you want to railroad any kinda of conversation about the industry into something chatgpt-related.
It seems you also noticed that native app developer jobs are disappearing. The majority of native app developers will switch to something else than react Native, I think.
Android was a terribly designed, even more terribly documented piece of bugs to begin with. What do you expect)
It feels like google bought whoever agreed the first just to have a mobile platform asap in portfolio, they didn’t bother about the quality or user or, god fobid, dev experience.
It was not that bad at all, one of the core file is 10K LOC, rock SOLID! Compose is fixing it for the baseline, loving Google's premature architecture where you need to invent the same wheel for production again and again at every other company. There is HILT but not enough, there is navigation but not enough, etc. In general, the things they built are suitable for semi-complete demo apps. Please point me to a simple CRUD app that is fully complete with error handling popups and unit tests, that can scale to build complicated real-life apps!
The innovative period of Android Development where you can do anything is gone forever because of greedy corporations who can get away with any abuse in the system. And many of those "new" APIs are not being implemented, either not encouraged by business or the teams not aware about those features. Since the launch, I have developed and seen development of apps implementing shortcuts are exact 2, I have seen 12-14 apps being developed and launched with more than 7 screens and 8 defined workflows in that period and they are yet to develop a widget, a shortcut and they spent 2-3 versions in prod (with heavy marketing) without dark themes. This story is more or less same with every user facing features. Thus making more then half of the apps are just websites written in Kotlin instead of any JS frameworks. Atleast websites don't fight with Play Store and the restrictive policies.
Plus the confusing era of Google isn't helping anyone. I haven't seen excitement around any product and ecosystem launched since 2018 except flutter and Firebase. Assistant, Instant Apps there are many "launches" which are almost dead on arrival. For long Google is like a startup who sees what sticks on the wall, and wind down the others, except the OTHERs have no ecosystem and winding down affects hundreds of developers and thousands of users. Which is affecting android too.