These things don't justify wasting over a million bytes. Many of them are not even real issues.
> Where is the header bar
Why should there be one if I haven't defined one? If I define it, then I will tell you where to put it and how to render it. Better yet, if it's a standard, I expect the system to already include the libraries necessary to facilitate its usage.
> What color is it? What font? What placement
If it's implemented in the standard library, these can all have default values (like html pages do). Even if I define these, they should not take more than a few bytes. Not even a kilobyte.
> What about users who don't read English? What about users who's languages don't fit in ASCII.
Why do I need to include extra bytes to tell the system to use UTF-8? It should be the default. At most, deciding which unicode encoding to use should not take more than one byte. I don't think there are more than 4 or so options anyway. UTF-8. UTF-16, UTF-32. Did I miss something?
> What about users who's languages aren't read left-to-right.
What about them? Doesn't the system come with text rendering facilities? Don't they support international languages? What kind of OS is this? Haven't the OS designers heard about HarfBuzz?[0]
> How should the header bar even be drawn?
Did you just repeat a previous question to make the list bigger?
> It's easy to say "I saved 5k bytes by dropping RTL" but... you dropped all RTL language support.
No, because adding or dropping "RTL" does not require any bytes.
The sample app does not even include any i18n so there is no text in any RTL language.
You only need to support RTL if you are writing an OS or a text rendering library. This is not an issue that applications need to deal with.
> Some poor souls at Google waste a lot of time making sure developers get a large library of useful layouts and controls that all mostly-just-work mostly-consistently across a huge spectrum of devices and API releases.
The Android API is notorious for being terrible. I know Google spends a lot on it, but damn IT SUCKS!
Just because someone wastes a lot of time on something does not mean they managed to do it well.
(Not that _I_ would do it any better; So spare me the ad-hominem criticism).
[0] https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz/