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You can open Android Studio, create a new project and "Go!". It'll work. Then you can add a single line of code to dependencies and you get even better APIs!

I also have no idea why are you mixing the device updates into the developer tooling argument. New apps are (should be - and the tutorials tell you so) developed with API 19+ in mind which means that you'll have to work for quite a while to get any problems with fragmentation and updates. You can even start development on API 21 and ditch support libraries all together and STILL not shed significant amount of userbase.

>You can open Android Studio, create a new project and "Go!". It'll work

I tried this after their 1.0 release and it crashed. Mileage varies from person to person

I believe you, but Android Studio has come a long way since.

I agree it was abysmal at first - when it didn't crash, every new update would break compatibility and your projects wouldn't build anymore etc.

Right now it's pretty decent, considering, although I'm not a fan of Gradle either.

By the way, even though it's a fork of IntelliJ Idea, it's ultimately shaped by Google which has sort of a tradition of realeasing alpha-stage software into the world. Remember first releases of Chrome? I do; they crashed like crazy and lacked basic functionality such as printing.

> It's just a mess. I'd expect a relatively painless experience: install dev tools, start a new project, build and go! But no, it's jumping through hoops, requires understanding a myriad of different SDK/platform versions and a constant churn in keeping your apps up to date with new versions while trying not to break backwards compatibility.

> And a big part of this mess comes from the fact that device manufacturers and mobile operators are unwilling to keep old devices up to date (and Google can't force them, while I think they should with some kind of licensing contracts), leaving customers exposed to security flaws while keeping the developers churn high with multiple versions to be supported.

Is it only me or there are tons of similarities to C# and the .Net environment?! More and more I feel Google just ends up with the same solution MS came up with in order to handle the diversity of vendors using its platform and their conflicting interesse.

C# is as easy to get started with as I've seen for any language. I don't see the comparison?

ASP.NET used to be difficult to configure and deploy (just some things like basic defaults being pretty bad for real apps), but even then I'd say the alternatives at the time (EJB, Spring, etc.) were significantly worse. For all other uses, I've had zero tooling problems. Oh sure, there were times I painted myself into a corner with regards to my app design, but that will happen in any language. I've never found any platform as easy to get up and running as .NET.

Hey, Im a Javascript developer and my experience es far from 'miserable'. Anyway, I see your point, and makes sense. I think node and npm helped a lot to actually achieve the flow you mention ("install dev tools, start a new project, build and go!").