The android studio sdk still has a large target surface, and happily tells you how much market share you will miss out on by raising the minimum target level. The recommended minimum target is Android 4.1. It also still supports legacy (non androidx) libraries, which can lower the minimum target to Android 2.3. Google is doing it's hardest to force developers to conform to their shit by nuking old documentation on not androidx.
Going full native is still possible at least, and if you target opengles, you can absolutely get away from all Google development and completely step away from the framework. Obviously stepping away from the framework means more knowledge and time needed to get something off the ground.
4.1 is great except I wasn't able to install new certificates on my device, which made anything secure difficult to use.
The only applications I ever developed were simply wrappers for websites. Not really much development going on there.
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