I absolutely agree. I’ve done Android for the last eight years, and I’m glad it wasn’t my introduction to software engineering.

It is definitely not friendly to beginners. I’ve seen newcomers struggle to get simple apps to function correctly with all the nuances of mobile development.

That said, I do believe things today are much easier to cope with on Android than ever before. The problem is the mix of best practices that you refer to.

Really it’s because Android is still so new compared to something like web development. The tooling is getting significantly better though, and I do feel that it will be much more beginner friendly with Compose.

Compose fixes many of the dreaded issues of life cycle, state management, etc. I’ve been really enjoying using it, and can’t wait to never have to look at another Fragment again.