October 3, 2020

14:35

I really wonder when Android is going to implode under all of the technical debt, it’s engineers have been diligently piling up. You can’t even write a simple “Hello World” app anymore that just runs on all versions of Android. Well, you probably can, but you can’t publish it on the Playstore unless you target at least SDK level X (changes every year). In order to do so, you are forced to bundle a giant compatibility library (congratz, wasn’t the whole idea of the DEX binary format and that idiotic resource system to squeeze every byte out of the APK files?) and half of your code will deal with figuring out on which OS version it is running and how it should behave.

There’s really no part in Android that’s not an awkward compatibility hack. Playstore included.