Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

You are just trying to do something that nobody cares about making work on smartphones, and so you are "on your own".

Trying to do userland USB in an Android app to talk to a UVC webcam connected through USB OTG is not something even a niche of apps care for, and the native camera framework definitely doesn't care about because if it was trying to workaround the UVC spec Android phone cameras would have never left the original Gameboy camera age.

So with no native support for your use case, you are now having to wrangle the pretty shitty libusb and the even more terrible libuvc in working within the confines of an Android app. And to the credit of Android, this is possible! People have made it work! People with in depth knowledge of how the parts fit together, that is, and so GPT won't be of any help.

There's a bigger issue here: OP describes writing prototype software on a desktop, and compares this to writing more production-style software on a highly constrained mobile device. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

Python packaging is notoriously bad, and while you can get a Linux/Windows compatible script without too much work, getting to a single executable that just runs is much harder. Cloning a repo, setting up a virtualenv, installing an openssl dependendcy or whatever, is just not something that exists in the mobile world. We have to put more effort into the packaging, and that means a higher bar for things like this. There are answers to this in Python that claim to produce single, relocatable, Python binaries, and I've never seen one without a huge list of caveats. Even yesterday I was patching an open source library that didn't work inside one of these because it had the gaul to use... checks notes, os.path.

> Well, looks like modern mobile phones are not a great hacker's playground, huh?

This sums it up. They are not. The security environment on these devices pretty much ends this before you even get to writing any code, and that's generally a good thing. Phones are appliances for most people. There's a reason why "apps" took off in a way that boxed desktop software never did, and there's a reason why boxed desktop software on Windows did far better than package managers on Linux. Almost everyone wants more a more polished experience. Shipping a Python script running OpenCV to a phone is not going to produce a polished experience.

> Do you want to break your Linux installation or rearchitecure your runtime? [Y]

(But really, Android dev is a qualitatively different level of fucked up compared to React or any major Python framework I can think of. React Native, though...)

Gradle replaced Maven which replaced ant which replaced make. The tech treadmill was one of the reasons I retired early and I'm glad I did.

What is the new hotness replacing Gradle?

Strong agree - it's horrible. I can't get past the enormous amount of boilerplate code that's required to do anything - even the proverbial Hello World.