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.<p>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.<p>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.
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?
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.
Android was a terribly designed, even more terribly documented piece of bugs to begin with. What do you expect)<p>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.