God, Android development really is just awful.

This is a problem CMake had in like 2003 I think, but CMake actually fixed it. "Less user friendly than CMake" is a bad place to be

So check out this lovely error. Periodically I pull an update to the Android project I work with and I get an error like this. Sometimes the trick to this (the error doesn't explain this) is Tools->AGP Upgrade Assistant. But sometimes it means you need to upgrade Android Studio. To what? Error doesn't say. What I have to do is go on project chat and say "what version are we using now?". Then they say the name of an animal, like "hummingbird", and I have to work out what version # that is in Snap

This last issue is because Android Studio— necessary for Android development— is not a Google product. Rather it's "JetBrains"' IDE for "JetBrain's" version of Oracle's programming language. Injected into this like a kind of parasite are two separate programs that make Android work; one of the two, AGP, is developed by Google, and the other, Gradle, seems to be developed by the community. Gradle and AGP are at eternal war with each other. AGP doesn't know how weird their name sounds to me

Someday, I will encounter a situation where AGP (Android Google Plugin) makes use of HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) and my brain will break in a novel way

Anyway that's a lot of typing to say I had a bit of free time this morning, and I thought "I'll do some Android dev" and then went "wait before I dev I should see if I can get it to compile" and I could not get it to compile.

Okay. So I went back and, so I could fix the compile error caused by AGP needing a minor version update, upgraded Android Studio from 2024.1 to 2024.2. It now has a completely different interface, which I would say is much worse. It is like they were given a corporate directive to look like VS Code but didn't understand why people like VS Code. Cryptic icons on every edge. The light mode is not fully supported, some elements remain in dark mode.

Also I can no longer deploy builds to my phone.