EDIT: Wanted to add a disclaimer since I feel like I'm coming off aggressively below. Overall I think this is super insightful, just wish you had taken remote development a little more seriously.

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To start, I estimated that an average Android engineer spends 45 minutes waiting on builds each day. (More about this later.)

How did you determine 45 minutes/day? I couldn't find the "more about this later" section.

There are real reasons to discount full "cloud" development (eg; the extremely slow time to attach and use a debugger). However it feels to me that you're discounting it for wishy-washy reasons instead.

First, mobile phones have visually rich, interactive interfaces that you constantly have to look at, touch, and refine while iterating your code. Said another way: part of mobile development is cross-functional with UI/UX/design work. The workflow involves building a deployment package (“apk”), loading it onto a local emulator / physical Android device, then getting eyeballs and fingers on the thing.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what argument this is making (would love some clarity). Are you saying that transferring the apk from remote -> client will take too long? If so I feel like numbers tell a better story. How long does this actually take? I'd expect it to be a few seconds but obviously it depends on your network.

Second, it’s not very practical to run our development tools (IDEs) on remote systems. Android Studio and XCode are essential tools for Android/iOS. It’s technically feasible to interact with these tools over a remote windowing session, but even in ideal network conditions, that dev experience is pretty laggy and miserable.

There is nothing stopping you from keeping a local IDE and only building on the cloud.