[jeroenhd]

Android Studio had the exact WYSIWYG experience other toolkits used to have, it was just hidden behind an <AbsoluteLayout> because designing mobile applications the way desktop applications used to be designed is an awful idea.

Drop an AbsoluteLayout into a design and you can drag, drop, and resize buttons to your hearts' content. You'd have the same problem with VB6 where your buttons would fall off the screen if someone ran your application at a lower resolution than you designed it for, but that was never a problem for the desktop designer.

For the same reason dumping buttons on an arbitrary coordinate and resizing by eye is no longer acceptable on desktop, that same ease of design died out in Android for any serious application developer. It stuck around a while longer on desktop, unfortunately, but modern frameworks pretty much all use declarative layouts these days.