In this day and age, the Android UI is getting more and more features. Which is amazing.
But they get layered on top of years of TODOs, less-than-clean code, and quick patches.
This means the APIs are not as terse as us devs would like, and there’s plenty of unwritten knowledge to have to make things work. What if there was something that took the best bits of the Android UI model and wrapped that in a modern, sensible codebase?
Turns out, there is. It’s part of a “native cross-platform” framework, Flutter, that is being developed in Google and used in some of their products. While still a long way from stable and feature-complete, Flutter has an interesting approach of including a full framework based off of Dart. It’s modeled on the good bits of the Android UI framework and will allow your code to run consistently across devices, without the weird BSP- or vendor-specific issues we unfortunately got used to.
