[samoit]

I also agree that the development experience is awful. I have more than 10 years as an Android developer and Android Studio (someone remember when it was derived from Eclipse?) is painfully slow, even in modern machines. Just starting a new project is a ridiculously sluggish process. Also Gradle is a piece of hyper-complicated software that (almost) nobody is interested in, but it is there and you have to deal with it. Nowadays I am basically moving to Flutter, much more simpler and easier than kotlin.

[muzani]

Most of my stack overflow points are from helping people run their build in Eclipse :)

Gradle is deprecated now though. And Jetpack Compose is about as convenient as Flutter.

[hasbot]

Gradle replaced Maven which replaced ant which replaced make. The tech treadmill was one of the reasons I retired early and I'm glad I did.

What is the new hotness replacing Gradle?

[muzani]

Kotlin DSL

https://developer.android.com/build/migrate-to-kotlin-dsl

This one makes sense, though the improvement is minor.

[lmz]

That's still Gradle. Just a different language to configure it.

[rcarmo]

Yep. And I still use Makefiles to this day.

[muzani]

Eh, thanks for the correction. I originally read it as Groovy. Unfortunately, I can't edit or delete my original comment, but feel free to downvote it.

[vips7L]

Gradle replacing maven seems like a stretch. Maybe on Android. But everywhere else Maven is still going strong.

[WkndTriathlete]

I'd like to know where that is because I've watched as a lot of major 3rd-party Java libraries switch to Gradle from Maven.

[hasbot]

This is an Android thread. In this context, Gradle has most definitely replaced Maven.

[vips7L]

I don't think that's the context when they referred to ant and make.

[Groxx]

Gradle is the single worst thing about Android development imo. It's an obtuse, un-debuggable mess.

Library management got a LOT nicer when it was introduced, but surely we didn't need all of that to achieve it.

[shaftway]

Personally I use Bazel, but I was at Google for a decade and so I miss Blaze. Of course that has it's own steep cost the first time you use it because of ideological differences between repos inside Google and repos outside Google.

At this point I have a clean repo with Blaze set up that I use as a starting point for Android applications. Then Android Studio with the Blaze plugin and I'm set.