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Agree. Definitely no cathedral.

And what about customizing a Spinner's font and background color and popupBackground color and putting a non-standard element at the top?

And the amount of time it took before Android got percentage based spacing in layouts?

And the fun of remembering what UI attribute-values like android:gravity="center_horizontal", android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" and android:layout_gravity="center" mean?

And the awkwardness of using non-standard typefaces and using things like the RecyclerView and it's weird Adapter?

And the fact that for some reason they used an XML element named "layout" when they implemented their data binding feature?

And the fact that some attribute names are camelCased while others are underscore_cased?

And the ease with which memory leaks are introduced by inadvertently closing around context instances because you need context instances all over the place because the Activity is a god object?

It's all so very ... not ... like ... a cathedral.




Sometimes I have this feeling that they just offshore everything and just do some kind of integration at Mountain View.


interesting. i often wonder how the Android SDK got the way it is too.

my hazy guess was that Google simply hired a bunch of extremely smart programmers and let them code whatever they wanted. but there is no equally smart architecture/design team to guide, organize and filter the work. there's just a build system.

maybe that's essentially the same as your theory.




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