You talking about the pseudo-restful activity/intent design? Cause I'm not gonna defend that, haha. It's a neat idea that simplifies corner cases at the expense of making a lot of common cases very counterintuitive. If the article was bitching about that, I'd take it a lot more seriously.
I dunno, I have a soft spot for Java. Yes, the verbosity can be annoying, but compare that to the scavenger hunt that modern web languages put you on when you're trying to figure out exactly who is doing exactly what.
My biggest beef with Android is the frequency with which stuff gets stuffed in a Bundle and sent off elsewhere. Which means the typing isn't "you don't have to worry about getting this wrong, the compiler will help you" but rather "yet another thing you can get wrong that will explode at runtime."
Ugh. From your lips to god's ears.
Don't get me wrong, the inter-application intent stuff is really cool and good, but sometimes, guys, it's all in-app stuff. I need to tightly couple these objects. I need to pass actual non-serializable objects amongst activities within my app. I'm sorry, I just do. Marshalling and de-marshalling data out to a bundle or the database isn't going to cut it.
I've done a lot of native development, real native development, not this fluffy Java stuff and Android is still overly complicated in both design and tooling.
My needs as a developer on Android are far from cool and that shouldn't be unnecessarily hard -- but it is.