From 2012 i started Android development and no single year has passed i felt comfortable with APIs or its user interface. I was making innovative or rare hard to find apps like below.
- NGGallery (quit): which allowed slideshow of gallery images which speak their own information previously recorded by whoever clicked the pic.
- Binaural Sound Recorder (quit): Records stereo or binaural using 2 devices.
- BVH viewer (quit): bvh animated model viewer + BVH modifier (was WIP).
- Freeform Optics (quit): Makes complex lens and test how rays travel.
- Sacred Sound Visualizer (quit): Make cool flower like art from voice. Can also be used for various purposes.
- Image Size Reducer (nearly quit, just keeping updated to new Androids): Select a region of image and just tell the KB size for it and app will take it out for you in fraction of time. Or reduce the size of whole image to desired size without loosing noticeable image quality. Does not work for already low quality images.
- Various apps like Sound Effect makers using wave painting, Voice to instrument sound generation etc. I have built both these apps and are sleeping in my disk not uploaded anywhere. I am now keeping only very simple apps and the ones which are very useful. I don't even care for updating them or investing more time to them. Some of them are SoundFont-MIDI-Player which offers low latency playback and piano for SF2 samples, Image Size Reducer & image converter.
Back to the topic. Android has massive issues for developers and i have removed all tech details posted here previously. I am sharing only the most critical ones which non tech end users can understand.
Reason #1:
PlayStore itself has become the reason to not publish on playstore. If you publish an app and your cannot find that app by searching the exact name of it what do your think it means?
PlayStore just sells the top 3 ranks! Imagine a sports competition where top 3 are paid winners. Below is an example where 50% of screen from top is just ads.
I searched games and the result shows top 3 with Ad text. Most users don't know they are ads. They think they are top ranking apps. Why so shy clearly highlighting the apps as ads? Using a little "Ad" which most cannot see or notice.
Every fall in rank almost reduces the download by ~30-50%. Some of my apps come to top 3 ranks since 2016. Daily downloads were minimum 1500+. Now after 3 ads the actual rank become 5+ and download fell to 300-450. Similar times loss in earnings. Post covid life of many people has changed. Now it has become impossible to have any interest in working anymore. Google will kill many developers and ultimately itself.
Google is obviously feeling the heat of falling economy and earnings but that means you just keep increasing ads? There might be other ways to experiment.
These things will only become worse by time. Whether its YouTube or something else. Everyone will witness the fall of internet world. Crazy, nonsensical things rising and huge compromise in ethics. The compitition where money wins doesn't promote hard work but economic unethical practitioners. But ultimately Its the people themselves who are responsible for this.
Reason #2:
Google terminated my YouTube account for something i was not responsible. Google updated their policy and said an app on playstore which shows a demo video which comes from youtube account MUST not have ads enabled in that video. What i did was i unpublished 10+ of my apps due to lack of maintenance and time etc issues. Google bots are oversmart. They scan even the unpublished apps and found a YouTube video link with monetization enabled. They terminated the YouTube account. I just used that account to make few videos about app demos and it had nothing which violates youtube policies. YouTube deleted the account in spamming violation.
Google Play Store applied policy violation on dead/unpublished apps. This is beyond understandable...
This motivated me so much i deleted 2nd account of YouTube myself. Now i use YouTube without account and its more fun than before.
Technical reasons:
Android development is hell in itself. I will describe it using analogy. Suppose you are learning painting on a painting app. Everytime you learn a feature and UI layout it's removed next year. Most new things become obsolete and suddenly some features return after some time. Your spend 10yrs learning the app and its UI but learned nothing about painting itself.
The file management SAF (document API) in Android is most crappiest thing i have seen in years of development. Just trying to check if some files exists can takes seconds which even 90s era computer will not. In name of security and generics the core has been compromised. If you don't want to allow an app to read other app's data then just use an encryption filter. Every app has its own encryption. Use intents to allow decrypted reading. I am thinking what makes Android more secure than Linux? Even after so much security user data is still being theft. Because the data itself has got no security. Only Android infrastructure has become secure the user data remains in same fate.
Android has definitely become much better and the changes were critical in need and also had great intention. But if it makes experience of both end user and developers bad the result is bad.
I loved Android where i could listen to chiptunes, make awesome experimental apps, do innovation, playing with sensors etc.
Android has become IPhone. A well maintained jail with cool hardware that cannot be used for emulation, experimental apps etc like it was before. I cannot even enjoy using terminal shell.
Time has come for the innovative developers to say Android is dead or its not something to work for. Pure Linux must come to phone and it should not do what Android has done.
