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?

I currently use Grafana to view how all sorts of stuff changes over time. It gets the job done, but is far from ideal:

• edititng the data queries is intended to only be done in the web ui (so I end up just copypasting stuff to/from pycharm to at least have a nice text editor)
• can't store config in a git repo (yes, I can dump & restore the config as a huge json, but AFAIK the json structure is considered an internal api, so it can change at any time making versioning useless)
• all plot parameters other than the data query have to be configured via gui

I did try grafanalib some time ago and it didn't feel right. It was quite behind in plot types (Grafana screamed at me "don't use this plot type, use the new one instead"), and is using unofficial api (the json config again).

Any suggestions? It doesn't even have to be a ready-to-use tool, a library/framework for making dashboards will also do.