You would have to be crazy to adapt any new service from them, be it Messages, Stadia, or buying last year's phone for this year's price.
It appeared that the Android team was kind of forced to support C++ for game developers, and they did an half baked release with Android 2.0.
Using headers and toolchains different than what regular Android (internal Google teams) were using, thus took them all the way up to release 14 to actually provide unified headers.
Bionic wasn't fully ISO C compliant and has been being improved throughout all the NDK and Android releases.
Back when they decided to drop Eclipse there wasn't a roadmap for C++ support going forward, and they were kind of rescued after JetBrains decided to create CLion, which they took up to integrate into Android Studio, almost two years later.
There were two reboots for new build system tools, until they decided to keep ndk-build around and settle with CMake as alternative.
Even though the NDK APIs are written in C++ (or C++ wrappers over JNI calls), they are exposed as extern "C" to userspace, thus being more prone to unsafe coding pratices.
Only now they are starting to think about supporting NDK package management, so far each Android NDK developer using AARs had to come up with in-house solutions to package NDK libraries across projects.
Small rant, plenty of other stuff to complain about. However I would also like to add that the (apparently) small NDK team has improved the experience a lot, when comparing with what the Android 2.0 NDK state started from.
If they don't keep -a going, then they've blown it. The Nexus line was great.
They've also already totally blown it with all the texting bullshit. Hangouts is awesome. Carrier based texting is a significant step backwards.
I developed several apps on the platform with the motivation that I was helping a good product thrive.
The Pixel line has always been just a sad runner-up to Apple, but always with completely deluded prices. The oft talked about "Reality Distortion Field" best applies to Google's hardware products now, where they've created a succession of miserable entrants at bizarrely unrealistic prices.
Now I'm typing on a Macbook Pro with my iPhone 11 beside it. I use gmail out of legacy inertia, but aside from that Google just is not a compelling part of my life. I once truly believed they were a super innovative company that was trying to escape their ad revenue stream. Now I believe they're a very committed ad company desperately trying to push ads further afield.