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Comment by PicassoCTs | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a very Open-Source approach. Ignore the documentation, ignore the tutorials, grab the Repo of a working project close to what you want and read the code, until you can modify it.

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Kinda, but Square actually had an alternative way of managing UI flow, enabled by a couple libraries they wrote, and a bunch of other support libraries for basic stuff like making HTTP requests, all of which was so much saner than Google's standard way(s) of doing things. You'd end up writing Square/Android, in the sense of GNU/Linux, if that makes sense. Why Square, of all places, straight-up killed it on that particular platform, I have no idea (no shade intended to folks at Square, it's just unexpected situation). It's not like they just had a really good project template or something.

> but Square actually had an alternative way of managing UI flow

Are you talking about Flow/Mortar? Those were pretty much abandoned and were, imo, overly complex.

That said, the Android UI flow was pretty bad before. Hopefully Compose makes it better.

IIRC Square had a technical manager (maybe CTO level?) who came from Android at Google, which may have helped. Square also open sourced early iOS tools like PonyDebugger which were ahead of the game when they came out. When they hired Jake Wharton they got a stellar champion of open source software creation whose focus was Android.

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