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The original was posted on /r/androiddev by /u/MaHcIn on 2024-09-20 17:42:40+00:00.

Hey everyone, I’m sorry to be coming with a negative thread, but I just need to vent and hear someone else’s opinion.

First of all, I’d like to point out that I’ve been an Android Developer since the Eclipse days, so I’ve seen the platform evolve, like many of you here.

You’d think that after so many years, my Android skills would be excellent and I could write almost any type of app from scratch, but I often find myself Googling the most mundane things. Things that I’ve implemented probably 100+ times in the span of my career and for some reason, instead of getting a firmer grasp on how it works, I seem to feel more and more confused.

I feel like things were fine and everything felt “under control” up until about the time when they introduced androidx / Jetpack and a bunch of dependency fragmentation.

I feel like since then, my Android experience went from 80% development, 20% Googling for issues, to something like 40% development, and 60% dealing with figuring out which dependency I need to add to my project in order to get some new UI component. Or I want to make my existing app Android 15 edge-to-edge friendly and I’ll spend the next week figuring out 3 different ways to approach system insets, with all of them seemingly clashing together, one working on one screen but breaking the other screen.

The worst is when I think to myself “alright I’ll be a model developer and actually read & understand the docs” and then the docs are absolute jack shit, outdated, without any examples and absolute minimal amount of explanation.

Then I decide to Google for a specific problem, making sure I include the right “Android” keywords in my search and I’ll still get solutions for React Native or Flutter.

It just feels… like a mess. I am an iOS developer as well, which I started a couple of years after Android, so theoretically I should have less experience there, but my iOS development is so much smoother I am starting to dread starting up Android Studio.

I don’t know if it’s an impostor syndrome or something else, but I just feel “slow and dumb” whenever I develop for Android. Like I should be much better than this.

Anyone else in the same boat?