During the early days of computing GUI / UX was kind of a sad story.
For developers, it meant punching holes, for users it meant looking at a display with a terminal or even worse paper. Luckily, it’s 2023 and a lot has changed. The punch cards got replaced by better programming languages and slowly we went from slow computers on networks with only a gnarly TCP protocol into the early 2000s where SOAP (XML_RPC) slowly got replaced by Salesforce’s REST API. YES! Finally modern times.

Years passed by where WEB2.0 slowly came up from 2004 and Flickr, YouTube, Facebook took the lead but we were still sadly sitting behind desktop PC’s with normal screens. Although I was running around with an i-mate Jam and later the HTC Diamond on Windows Phone, most people had a Nokia and a WAP connection to find the internet.

In 2007 the iPhone saw the light and in 2008 the first Android Phone: the Google G1. I still own it and I really can’t understand how I was able to use that device if I look at my current phones.

Where Android development consisted of a XML Framework where you could create a website like GUI for your app with every month a new library from Google to fill that frame with data in Java. Image loaders didn’t exist and the only way to find out if someone understood Android was creating a case and asking how they would fix this issue where the data was on the other side of the world and you had to access it with an app with a slow internet connection.

If they came up with the word AsyncTask I would be happy for me because I found someone who understood the Android stack, but a bit sad for them because it was a monster. Android development was a tedious process of incompatible libraries, TLS issues with older phones and different screen sizes, processor speeds and lots of other discrepancies. Although years passed by, Android kept creating new libraries where one was a bit better than the other but Android developers kept looking at each other with that sad gaze. We all knew what we had to deal with in those hours of work.

Looking at my time at agap2, I went from Android developer working with XML and Java to the new generation of Android development. That new generation feels better, faster and smarter and yet I still feel that history in the code, issues and design. Where our servers went from PHP or Python Backends with a separate mySQL Database or worse we now have dockerized (Compose) Postgres with a Hasura backend passing us GraphQL data that is completely integrated our Android code and all the data is presented with simple lines of code accessing data and putting it on the screen. Just compare a bit of XML + Java with Jetpack Compose for the same result. It’s a dream. And the magic word? It’s COMPOSE!

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