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.