I tried to follow an Android tutorial (in Kotlin, so it should have been a modern one) a while ago, and the only conclusion I can come to is it was all designed by 500 different people over 15 years who never spoke to each other, and nobody ever dared throw anything away.

I’ve never seen such a basic CRUD app (and incidentally wasn’t even doing the C, U or D of that) take so many lines of code to do “properly”. Nothing that simple should be that complex. Everything seems geared up for “what if you want to translate to 100 different languages, change the back end at any point, and individually configure forms for these 80 different aspect ratios on devices?” Yeah, what if I don’t?

I still use Delphi for my sins, and while it has its faults (mostly that it’s closed source, and no fucker else uses it so I can’t work anywhere else), but simple apps like that are “drop a few things on a form, add half a dozen lines of code and run it”.

There’s all these places in Android that should be easy, but because you’re going through three levels of XML files and umpteen factory classes, it isn’t.