It's been really fun writing this from scratch and trying to design a mobile-friendly API that fits the OTel spec. There's still work to do on OTLP export and various other features - if this project interests you, please do get in touch!
The main interest I've seen in OTel from Android engineers has been driven by concerns around vendor lock-in. Backend/devops in their organisations are typically using OTel tooling already & want to see all telemetry in one place.
From this perspective it doesn't matter if the OTel SDK comes bundled with a bunch of unnecessary code or version conflicts as is suggested in the article. The whole point is to regain control over telemetry & avoid paying $$$ to an ambivalent vendor.
FWIW, I don't think the OTel implementation for mobile is perfect - a lot of the code was originally written with backend JVM apps in mind & that can cause friction. However, I'm fairly optimistic those pain points will get fixed as more folks converge on this standard.
It's been really fun writing this from scratch and trying to design a mobile-friendly API that fits the OTel spec. There's still work to do on OTLP export and various other features - if this project interests you, please do get in touch!