I developed for Android a few years ago (I don't do it any more), and I didn't find the documentation "horrific." There is JavaDoc for pretty much everything.

I developed for Android a few years ago (I don't do it any more), and I didn't find the documentation "horrific." There is JavaDoc for pretty much everything. Like anything else, there are a few dark corners, but mostly there are people discussing them online, so you can figure it out. I didn't use the SQLite API, but isn't the point of that API to "pollute" your code with SQL? I might be misunderstanding your complaint here-- do you believe the API shouldn't exist at all? Or that it's overused? It seems like there are a few cases where SQL is exactly what you need-- like building a finance program or something. With regard to the UI: I always saw the Layout classes as the View, the Activity as the Controller, and the Model as the classes that implemented the application itself. If anything, the big complaint people had seemed to be that Android was too structured, that it required you to do too much work before seeing anything on the screen. I agree that the XML files often seemed clunky, but at least you could vertically center a text box without magic, something that's apparently very difficult and unintuitive with HTML. Android also planned ahead for different screen sizes and form factors. The real "hack" (in the bad sense) is what Apple had to do when they made the iPad-- to run iPhone apps with doubled, blocky pixels to preserve the aspect ratio. Speaking of the "eternally inadequate GC", Android's GC has gotten better over time. MUCH better. I remember back in the 1.0 days 100 ms pauses were common. Now, the average is less than a tenth of that. The UI is still not as responsive as iOS, but it's getting there. I see no reason why the GC couldn't improve even more, with top people at Google working on it. With regard to the permissions thing: I agree with you here. It would really be nice to give users the ability to deny certain permissions to apps. As you mention, they probably don't do this because they don't want to destroy the business model of ad-supported apps that use the network. Hopefully some kind of solution can be reached here. I never actually developed for J2ME, but I knew a few folks who did, and they hated it. I remember tales of being stuck with Java circa 1.4 (no generics), ancient libraries, and even... ugh... Swing. I'm not that familiar with J2ME, so again, maybe it improved later on? Also, do you really think that delivering "100 different builds" (your words) is an easy thing for a company to do? With Android, I only need to deliver one build, and I have a store that can do most of the work for me. I think you are looking at the past through some seriously rose-tinted glasses.