I do not think writing Android apps is straight-forward and would not recommend it to new developers or engineers like the author who want to do other things li

I do not think writing Android apps is straight-forward and would not recommend it to new developers or engineers like the author who want to do other things like iOS. People's expectations for apps is only getting higher, and there are many, many things you need to understand in order to be a produce great Android apps. As an example, another commenter noted the Android platform engineers not being opinionated about application development as a "lofty ideal", but more likely this is a consequence of the framework team having enough on their plate. The vanilla Java AOSP API surface (not even considering the NDK, support libraries, Google Services, etc.) is enormous. The Activity lifecycle is complicated, and it's very easy to leak memory or write spaghetti code. There are many ways to do similar tasks, and these also change with time. Etc. That said, I love being an Android developer, and it is improving at an accelerated rate. To start, Android Studio and Gradle are far superior to the pain of getting Eclipse, Ant and the SDK tools working together. Yes, Swift is awesome and shiny, but there is so much more to a platform than the language. Java has excellent tooling - great support for debugging, monitoring, automated testing for CI/CD (automated UI testing still needs work, but also improving), static analysis, etc. The support libraries are also a godsend, enabling you to make an app that looks modern while being frequently updated and handling a lot of the compatibility headache from the platform's diversity. Finally, there's a lot of great content online. The conferences are great and its expected to see their content on YouTube. Google's Android Developer YouTube channel is also fantastic (shout out to Jo and Ian!), and Google is slowly but surely improving the developer docs and integrating their sample code into Android Studio. So yes, you do need to understand the new functional reactive approach. You need to know how to write a Gradle build. You have to understand the complexities of proguard rules. It's all pretty frustrating. But I also feel that many of the skills are more easily transferrable - I can also write a Gradle build for a library or I can use IntelliJ to better debug a servlet. With Swift and iOS, there's only vendor you can build for.