So, I decided to resurrect a thing I was working on a ~year ago.

There I had to update a library (one of the Compose ones), I don’t even remember the reason why anymore. And then all the hell broke loose: AGP, kotlin compiler, compose compiler, something-kotlin-stdlib, a billion of tiny separate androidx.* libs, even the damn Android Studio itself, all incompatible with each other, some renamed, some replaced by a different thing, some having version coming from unknown depths.

Couple of hours of “copypaste meaningless error message to google, get some ‘change version of X to Y’ from stackoverflow, click the elephant of misery button, wait, maybe click the run button, goto 1” later I wonder, how (if?) is it even feasible to “just” make and maintain an app for Android as a single developer.

How do you guys deal with it? Reading changelogs every morning on the toilet? Using some secret thirdparty BOM? Maybe a template project one can copypaste the gradle stuff from? Or just use Qt/flutter/godot/raw opengl and forget about all this misery?