I haven't touched Android development since 2012. I remember the experience being a terrible hodge-podge of XML and Java which effectively required an absolutely attrocious IDE and an impossibly slow emulator. I assume things have changed since then, but I wonder by how much and if Flutter's workflow skirts any of these issues altogether.
Those are still the not fun parts to work with in Android, although its better now kotlin extensions so you no longer have to refer to the XML directly to manipulate views.
Flutter doesn't use any of that, you just code and thats pretty much it. No XML or anything, and you can use VSCode which is a lot lighter than android studio.
Yes, tremendously so. It's still XML for basic UI, but Kotlin is the primary language of choice these days, Android Studio is a solidly world-class IDE, and the emulator is very fast.
> but I wonder by how much and if Flutter's workflow skirts any of these issues altogether.
Flutter uses the regular Android emulator, and although you have more editor choice the recommended was to just use a plugin for Android Studio.
Your layouts & styles are typically all in XML. But honestly I don't find it bad - it's not "proper" XML, so there's not a ton of cruft. It's really more like XHTML.
