is it me or is android programming complicated as fuck?

i could not fucking get a fucking icon to appear on the ActivityBar and gave up. so much fucking xml to do a fucking hello world, fuck.

It's Java. What did you expect? The smallest app is still several thousand bytes:

http://blog.javia.org/3430-bytes-the-smallest-apk-ever/

4k demo in Linux(!) and Windows...
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=10562
...ported to Android becomes 34k!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=st.martin.yrot&hl=en