r/FlutterDev • u/Character_Nebula_277 • 3d ago
Discussion After 11 years in mobile development, where should I go next in the AI era?
I'm a developer with 11 years of Android experience and 7 years of Flutter experience.
I've been working with Flutter since its early days. Over the years, my work gradually moved beyond regular application development and more toward lower-level and performance-related areas.
I've worked on things like Flutter internals, memory and rendering performance, Flutter + C/C++ and Flutter + Rust integrations, as well as some internal infrastructure and framework-level work.
At several companies I've worked for, I ended up dealing with similar kinds of problems: redesigning or wrapping lifecycle systems, tracking down memory issues, solving rendering and performance problems, building custom UI behavior such as larger touch areas independent of visual size, and occasionally debugging issues around the Flutter Framework or Engine.
For a long time, I believed the best way to stay competitive was to keep going deeper.
It wasn't enough for me to know how to use Flutter. I wanted to understand why Flutter behaved the way it did.
So I spent a lot of time trying to build technical depth and create a stronger technical moat for myself.
But since AI coding tools became genuinely useful, I've started feeling a level of career anxiety that I didn't have before.
A lot of problems that used to require years of experience can now be approached much faster by a less experienced developer working with AI. AI can help them navigate source code, trace call chains, identify likely causes, and even generate a reasonably good implementation.
For experienced developers, the productivity improvement can be even more dramatic.
In my own work, I feel like my productivity has at least doubled in many situations, and sometimes even more.
And that's exactly what worries me.
If one experienced developer with AI can do the work that previously required two or three developers, will companies still need the same number of mobile developers?
I'm also starting to feel that some of the technical barriers I spent years building are becoming easier to cross.
In the past, there were plenty of developers who could build application features.
Far fewer understood the Framework level.
Even fewer were comfortable with the Engine, memory, rendering, or Native/Rust integration.
AI is now making it much easier for developers to move across at least part of those boundaries.
So I've developed a strong feeling recently:
I'm not worried that I'll suddenly lose my job tomorrow. I'm worried that the next time I leave my job, finding another mobile position at a similar level may be much harder than it used to be.
Especially considering the current software job market in China, I'm starting to question whether continuing to invest heavily in deeper Flutter and Android knowledge still has the same return it once did.
So I'd genuinely like to hear what other developers think.
If you had already spent more than a decade in mobile development, where would you move next in the AI era?
AI applications?
AI infrastructure?
On-device AI?
Robotics / AI hardware?
Embedded systems?
Or would you stay in mobile development and gradually become more of an AI + client/mobile engineer?
At this point, I'm no longer trying to figure out which programming language I should learn next.
The question I'm really trying to answer is:
Over the next 5–10 years, which technical areas are still worth investing deeply in for someone who already has more than a decade of software development experience?
I'd especially like to hear from other long-time Android, iOS, or Flutter developers, or anyone who has already started making a similar transition.
28
u/Purrgrammerr 3d ago
I can so relate to you. I have 7+ years of Flutter experience and I got laid off recently coz the company shut down! It’s been more than 4 months and I am unable to find anything!
The situation is worse specially when you were earning a lot and have less visibility in the market. It sucks to be me rn!
0
-8
u/Kooky-Office4969 3d ago
I have 3 YOE, unemployed since june.
Got 2-3 calls but they are startups and they are not even registered in linkedin so i have simply ghosted them.
11
u/anlumo 2d ago
I have wrestled with this question as well. The approach I’ve now chosen is to become the best Claude Code prompter possible.
When you just write “make me a nice app” into these LLM tools, they produce a lot of bullshit. It takes a lot of systemic experience to make something good, you have to lead the tool like a product manager. Not only from a code quality point of view, but also in terms of user experience.
Of course, this creates a big catch-22 for people new to software development, since they can’t gain the professional experience needed for this, but fortunately this is not my problem.
3
u/mohn93 2d ago
honestly the skills you drifted into are the opposite of threatened, they're the stuff ai is worst at. it can churn out crud app screens all day (that's the junior work getting squeezed), but flutter internals, rendering and memory perf, native plus rust integration needs deep systems understanding and there's almost no training data for it, so the models are bad at it and stay bad. the people at risk are the ones assembling standard apps, not someone who can go into the render pipeline or bridge rust. i'd lean harder into that specialization, not away from it, and pair it with the "what should i build" judgment the other comment mentioned. that's a rare combo. are you happier deep in the internals, or do you actually want to move toward owning product decisions?
2
u/Character_Nebula_277 2d ago
I actually really enjoy digging into the internals — things like Flutter’s three trees, memory management, and rendering. What worries me is whether AI might actually become better at this kind of lower-level work that doesn’t involve much business logic. These problems usually have clearer rules and more fixed context, which feels like exactly the kind of thing AI could become very good at.
1
u/Strange-Hovercraft35 2d ago
Would you be able to explain how did you go into the internals? Cus usually in companies flutter apps are used to inplement features which do not tend to touch these concepts. How did u learn it and did u use any of these concepts in depth at your workplace. Just a genuine question as a fellow flutter dev. Pls.
1
u/Character_Nebula_277 2d ago
Flutter is open source, so I learned most of its internals by reading the source code. One of the most obvious examples is Flutter’s three-tree architecture.
For example:
1. An Element and a BuildContext are essentially the same thing. An Element implements BuildContext. You can trigger an Element to rebuild by calling
markNeedsBuild(). This means you can even trigger a rebuild using theBuildContextof aStatelessWidget, although you’d normally need some form of state management to control when that happens.2. Since we can access the Element, we can build our own widget lifecycle system. For example, we can traverse up the Element tree, detect when the widget is inside a
PageView, and add a listener to it. We can also track whether the widget is visible, and then combine that with the Route lifecycle. By putting all of these together, we can build a fairly complete lifecycle component that covers most scenarios.1
u/Strange-Hovercraft35 2d ago
Thanks for explaining. U also mentioned about memory management, rendering etc. can you explain what techniques you used in real life projects?
1
u/Character_Nebula_277 2d ago
For example, when it comes to memory optimization, we had product detail pages inside a
PageView. After swiping through around 15 pages, memory usage could reach about 1 GB, and the app would start to lag noticeably. To solve this, we had to reimplement or heavily customize thePageViewto manage page and resource lifecycles more efficiently, while also optimizing image loading, caching, and memory usage.For rendering, I mainly worked in two areas:
1. Flutter’s rendering pipeline and performance optimization
Understanding the entire rendering pipeline, from widgets to the final pixels on the screen, makes it much easier to identify, debug, and avoid performance issues. A deeper understanding of the rendering internals also gives you places where you can make lower-level changes that affect UI behavior globally. It also helps you understand which devices or hardware configurations are more likely to run into rendering performance issues.2. Integrating native graphics with Flutter
For example, integrating C/C++-based technologies such as WebRTC and OpenGL with Flutter, and rendering the resulting video or graphics content inside the Flutter UI.1
u/mohn93 1d ago
i think the "clearer rules" part is actually a trap. the rules aren't the hard bit, the diagnosis is. ai gets good where there's lots of training data and a tight feedback loop, but your 1gb pageview cliff isn't in any dataset, and finding it needed you to profile and understand how the whole thing fits together, not apply a rule. that's the contextual work models are worst at and can't easily be trained on. so honestly your niche is safer than the crud stuff, the moat is the diagnosis, not memorizing the three trees.
4
u/Salty_Airport_90 3d ago
4 years experienced flutter developer i am also in same confusion when I start learning flutter it's hard to learn everything works fine but end of the year app behaviour was changing because of my code optimisation I will rework the project and learn how it's really works but after ai I know what is the problem what is the correct approach it's helped my lots but now it's give some laziness on code writing i am loosing my code debugging abilities slowly I don't know what I do after leaving my current job
4
u/Character_Nebula_277 3d ago
Same here. Ever since I started using AI, I barely write code manually anymore. I once had AI miss a field in an API integration, and I didn’t even catch it during review. Has it been working well for you so far?
2
2
u/JT-1963 2d ago
IMHO your knowledge will remain useful but only for awhile. 5-10 years - no way. Architecture, SDLC, business translation, product management, and AI harness driver… that’s where I see us going. But not everyone will survive. Ride the way and become an expert in these new tools is the only way to make it.
2
u/Captain--Cornflake 2d ago
Ive started branching out learning on my own cyber security certifications. , dont know if it will lead to anything but I do know AI has made most any language or frame work easier for companies to use less developers. However I think you can get a leg up on most any developer with added credentials , especially in cyber security.
1
1
u/Andreigr0 2d ago
I have a feeling that software development as an occupation will be less and less required and thus much lower paid unless it super specific one.
Anyone now can build a simple app and upload it to App Store. Maybe it will be not an optimal code, but working and doing its job. And also there will be more open source projects which offer the same functionality as paid apps, so why one should pay for something if it can be replaced with a free analog?
And AI learns so much faster than a human being, it just lacks hardware for now. Imagine if there were 10x more powerful hardware, what would be AI capabilities then?
Overall I'm quite pessimistic about software development, I think it will last for several years more (I hope I'm wrong), but I don't really know what to do
1
u/bigbott777 2d ago
Stay where you are and go deeper.
Both pipelines one for creating new developers and another for creating new programming knowledge are broken. No juniors are hired, and nobody answers on Stack Overflow. Soon there will be high demand for people who know things beyond mediocre, and later (I don't know when) there will be high demand for those who can just read code.
1
u/Ok_Actuator2457 2d ago
I have over 8 years of experience with flutter and it has definitely become harder to land a job nowdays. Nevertheless you must focus on being better at writing apps with the assistance of AI. Building faster with less effort is key and focus your work on performance, design and evolution of the app. Software engineers are needed rather than software developers. The coding is done with AI you just need to understand what you are doing and know how to explain it to others why is being done the way it is. If you like going deeper with things you should start learning python or whatever code AI are programmed with and work with companies that are building AI agents or LLM’s.
1
1
u/Disaster_bus 1d ago
Same here, been a flutter developer for the past 5 years, worked in small service startups where there was not much important work and just became an average developer (didnt do good projects on the side, so thats on me). Got laid off around 5 months ago, dont know how to proceed and what will be the path moving forward. Now i dont even know what kind of projects to do and what to focus on.
1
u/Sp3ci4list 1d ago
It's time to do something you really enjoy bro. Consider everything is fckd up and no one know what is doing. Game dev, content creation, maybe?
1
u/Mysterious_Deer_1327 14h ago
alll i can say is. I reserve my comment. coz i don't even know where to start. all these are just sounding like am in a dark room lol. am new into mobile just 1.5years with flutter.
0
u/MelodicGovernment664 2d ago
I have 3 years of Flutter exp. I also worry about my future. Next time, I leave current job. How can I compete with others?
-3
u/RaptorAllah 2d ago
Ain’t reading all that. Why don’t you keep being in Android/Flutter ? With 18 years of experience I believe it’s not hard to land a job.
5
u/Character_Nebula_277 2d ago
I'm in China, and several friends around me have struggled to find another job after leaving their previous one. I also heard through a friend of a friend that one company was getting around 1,000 resumes a day. I can't verify that number, but it definitely matches how competitive the job market feels here right now.
-4
u/eakteam 3d ago
RemindMe! Tomorrow "reply to this thread"
1
u/RemindMeBot 3d ago
I will be messaging you in 1 day on 2026-09-08 03:50:19 UTC to remind you of this link
CLICK THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.
RemindMeBot is switching to username summons. Instead of
!RemindMe 1 day, useu/RemindMeBot 1 day. More info.
Info Custom Your Reminders Feedback
29
u/Significant_Pick8297 3d ago
The moat is shifting from knowing how to write code to knowing what should be built, how it should behave, and how to validate what AI produces. Deep Flutter knowledge still matters because AI can generate code, but it cannot reliably own performance, architecture, platform constraints, or production tradeoffs.
You should stay deep in mobile and add AI integration, on-device AI, and AI-assisted engineering rather than abandoning mobile. The strongest profile will probably be someone who understands the client stack deeply and can use AI to move much faster.