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Comment by arexxbifs | Hacker News Reader

I honestly can't tell if this is a joke? 0.5 KLOC. Seven files. That's not over-engineered?

A lot of that is due some Android APIs being insane. Amongst all of those, the RecyclerView adapter will be over a hundred, because it is a stupidly verbose API. Layouts are XML, so, yeah, stupidly large too. Those two contribute to a lot of those lines. Not so much overengineered as lol-google-apis engineered. ViewModels are also due to the batshit insane android lifecycle, where you can easily be bitten in the ass. All of those are not for fun. They're because the Android APIs are terribly crap, or because you're not allowed to do certain things on the main thread (like, say, database queries)

After that, you can very well put your activity/fragment/database logic in the same file, if you know you're never going to maintain it.

No matter how many times I write a recyclerview, which is usually atleast one for any new screen, it never stops being the worst part of Android dev for me.

I used to say it a lot. It's been a long time now, but heck for old time's sake: how I miss Windows Phone.

"Best practice Android development" is soon to phase out XML (for the most part) with Jetpack Compose. Working with two way data binding in XML seemed like a good idea, until you had to debug it.

"Soon".

Compose is still in dev builds. Expect to see alpha in a few months, betas in two years and RCs/Release in three. Not exactly "soon".

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