Android Jetpack Confusion As V1 Approaches
Android development seems to be in the hands of a leaderless team - or at least a team that has no idea where it is going. Google I/O is always time to announce new things, but as far as Android programmers are concerned all we get is more, and more and more. With Version 1 of Jetpack scheduled for July, what is the current state?
How do you write an Android program? I have to admit that at the moment I have no idea. The loudest shouting coming from the Android team is selling MAD - Modern Android Development - which seems to mean more or less whatever the team want it to mean, but there is a big reliance on anything in Jetpack. At first Jetpack was a sort of cleaning up of the mess that we already had, but it slowly evolved into a complete takeover attempt. What do you want to do -- there's a Jetpack solution for that...
So at I/O we have the announcement of the new beta of Android Studio which headlines its increased integration with Jetpack Compose. I have spent some time learning Compose and I have to say that I still don't understand what the fuss is about. Compose is about creating a UI - hardly rocket science and yet it seems the Android team can't really figure out what rocket they are trying to build. When Android Studio first appeared we were in the era of XML-style declarative UI. Serious programmers sat down and wrote lines of nested XML and tinkered with it until it was just perfect. Beginners opted to use the drag-and-drop UI editor, which generated the XML for them. It was all very easy and, while some of the widgets and layout components could have been a bit better, it mostly worked.
