IMO, this is exactly right. Not only is the quality of APIs often a disaster, the recommendations/best practices that Google is broadcasting have been way off in the past.
Rememember that Google has been advocating AsyncTask in the past. You could use something else or roll your own, but it doesn't make sense to do that when AsyncTask is being communicated as the way forward. They should've embraced third-party libraries, but instead they still communicate how to use AsyncTask. Example: last March 2016 they published a video on how to use AsyncTask [0]. They do highlight the red-flags around it, but do not mention any of the third-party libraries that are considered standard for a lot of Android developers already.
The same goes for Fragments. It is still being advocated as the right way, but I have some doubts. I imagine they will be advocated against in a couple of years. They help at the time, but are far from logical/simple when you don't know all of the crooks and crannies (and there are quite a few).
Another API that needs serious work is the Storage Access Framework (SAF). Previously Android applications could use the Java File API to access files. With recent Android versions this has been closed off with good reasons and intentions. Instead of using the File API directly, you now need to use SAF. SAF doesn't support all operations you could do with the File API. I would say this is a regression and existing applications that relied on these features are now broken and unrepairable. In addition, applications now needed to explicitly ask the user for permission to specific directories or files. This was so badly implemented that every file manager needed to instruct the user on how to use the directory picker of Android using screenshots before showing the picker. This is still a problem and even if it is fixed, it will still be a problem for years due to phones being unable to update.
To give you an impression on how those APIs are designed: many calls of SAF will return null to indicate something went wrong. No exceptions or error-codes. There is often no indication why a certain file cannot be retrieved. It could be non-existing, it could be denied permissions, it could be some strange behavior in the rom. There is sometimes a way to find out why this returned null and that is looking through Androids global log. I've implemented this in the beta of my app so that I could find out why files weren't accessible on some devices.
Also, because of the slow adoption of Android versions, your application needs to support both SAF and the Java File API. The support library has wrappers for Java File API that works like SAF, but it's still a downgrade to use this API as exceptions from the Java File API are just ignored [1].
For me Gradle is actually a step in the right direction. Builds seem to be more reproducible and do not fail randomly compared to the Eclipse/Ant days. The performance is however awful. Incremental builds take 30 - 60 seconds. When comparing this to building pure Java projects it shows that it is an Android-only issue and not one with Gradle.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtlRNNhane0
[1] https://github.com/guardianproject/android-support-library/b...