Ask HN: Is Android development a thing of the past?
Not seeing much job postings anymore, people are no longer consuming or discovering new apps, there is no innovation.
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.
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.
Here's a modern stack I made, should be able to spin up an app in an hour, and it shouldn't be too hard to read the code: https://github.com/smuzani/android-minimalist-template
Or if you want something production, Stripe's code is one of my favorites: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-android
Jetpack has some dark moments though, but that's a story for another day.
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 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.
https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/...