NotSteveYegge

It's not as simple as you might think. If Android OS becomes the plumbing, and Facebook controls the developer experience, then it levels the playing field for a competing hardware/software platform (e.g. Windows). It makes it harder for Google to "control" the platform.

It's analogous to how the browser came along and turned the desktop OS into plumbing for a lot of people. My wife uses a Mac but she really has no idea that it's a Mac. She only uses the browser, so she could easily switch to Windows. Apple has really no hooks into her at this point, and that's an uncomfortable position for Apple (or any desktop manufacturer) to be in.

Google _needs_ to maintain control of the developer experience. In my opinion they should add a TypeScript option to Flutter, embed the v8 javascript engine into Android, and support Flutter with JavaScript as a first-class citizen on the Android stack. They should start this work yesterday.

Android uses Gradle as its default build system. It gets extremely slow on large applications like Uber, Facebook, Nest, Snapchat, etc. The enterprise customers all complain to the Android tools team about it, and they throw a ton of work into trying to speed it up. And it gets more and more complicated.

Meanwhile, Uber (their marquee Gradle customer) just switched to Buck -- I don't think Google even knows this yet.

The build system in Android is a huge pain point for the dev stack. It's a big part of why things like React Native are gaining traction.

Your comparison to iOS is basically invalid/irrelevant, because iOS doesn't have the same legacy packaging issues (APK) as Android has. Android's build is actually quite complicated, more so due to the device proliferation, and it's getting worse over time.

Hope that helps. I'd be happy to answer more detailed questions about why it's so bad, since I've worked on it extensively in the past.