One of the biggest challenges for building on Android is its complexity, and the team must successfully integrate with a lot of surface area conceptually (the fundamental building blocks Dianne explains is just the start). This unusually negative comment thread (for HN, I think) is probably illustrative of how frustrating Android development can be.
On the other hand, it's been clear to me that Google is investing heavily in making Android an easier platform to develop for.
First, the tooling: Moving to Gradle for the build system was a huge improvement. Making a repeatable, extensible build is the vital with teams moving towards the DevOps world with CI/CD. Android Studio has also been a welcome change; all of the separate components of the build being integrated together makes for a much better development experience. The best example of this is Instant Run, which is a great accomplishment for the tooling team.
The Support Libraries are also a solid investment for implementing good patterns - particularly patterns that can be tricky to implement yourself like the separately sliding appbars. Getting more developers to adopt the support libraries also allows more compatibility, since Google can release the fixes independently from platforms.
YouTube has also been a great resource for Android developers as Google has been constantly releasing content about how to build better apps. Jo and Ian are really great.
Anyway, I would watch this space. It might be a coincidence that Dianne made this post, or the most recent videos ("concurrent tasks with multiple documents" and "tasks and back stack", respectively) were also about basic Android features. Maybe Googlers are reflecting on what Android is due to the current news of Oracle v Google. Or maybe it's because IO is this week. I'll be watching!