Why is Android Development so difficult/complex? (compared to Web and Desktop)

In terms of layers of complexity, none of that experience even comes close to Android Development though. To be honest, even Swing GUI in Netbeans/Eclipse wasn't that byzantine! (in fairness, I hardly ever went beyond Hello World there). To begin with, we are absolutely married to the Android Studio IDE and even though developing a project without AS is theoretically possible, the number of hooves you must jump though are probably too many for the average programmer to comprehend. Honestly, I still don't know how exactly the actual APK/AAB is built or compiled!

On other systems, compilation is a straightforward process like `gcc hello.c` or `javac Hello.java`, maybe a few extra parameters for classpath and jar libs for a GUI app but to be absolutely dependent on an IDE and gradle packaging system just to come up with a hello world APK? Don't you think there is an anti-pattern or at least some element of cruft here?

I get that Android operating system itself is highly complex due to the very nature of a smartphone device, things like Activities and Services aren't as straightforward as GUI Forms. But the point is that Android programming doesn't have to be that complex! Don't you think so?

https://kotlinlang.org/

Note that Google is using Kotlin internally themselves for writing Android apps because reasons.

If you want to have a great multiplatform development experience based on Kotlin, add Kotlin Multiplatform (https://www.jetbrains.com/kotlin-multiplatform/) and you are all set.

* Android having made lots of compromises to get Java running on resource constrained devices, leading to things like manually saving state in Bundles, Parcelables, SavedStataHandle, etc in combination with Component Lifecycles. These deep seated things remain.

* Lots and lots of undocumented behavior, poor documentation, etc. The Javadoc is in disrepair for many APIs, being just skeleton but not mentioning semantics, arguments, return values in all scenarios etc.

* Lots of API churn, stuff being deprecated constantly. You may need lots of compatibility paths.

* Just straight out bad ideas like Content Providers, which are still used in various APIs like DownloadManager (getting status, etc).

* Still have plenty of fragmentation and behavior differences (Samsung devices, etc)

* Google Policies continue to become more onerous. Seems like more of my effort goes towards administration than actually building. I suspect this is intentional, so only larger teams can get their stuff in Play Store.

* Mobile development in general is still kinda like shipping software on CDs, there is some delay for approvals, and some people won't get your update for a bug fix etc

I tried again to write a tiny Android app last year and couldn't figure it out. There's so many moving parts with SDKs, API levels, support libraries, contexts, fragments, Gradle, ... And the documentation is built similarly, bolting on new chapters when new concepts are introduced, making a whole that is useless and inscrutable.

It's really a shame. Is there a better starting point that could get someone ready to write a simple app in 2024? Some document that would introduce some reasonable workflow from A to Z (whether SDK, React Native, Kotlin, or whatever is simple)?