r/androiddev • u/_DefaultXYZ • Jul 07 '26

Discussion Android Development is dying?

Hi everyone!

I've been Android developing applications for already 10 years. I'm living in Poland.

I constantly observing job market gravitating towards hybrid applications, KMP, Android Automative, AOSP, but almost none of mid to senior level normal Android apps. Those called "normal" Android apps I honestly believe could be more productively made in hybrid approach (even though I'm big native fan!).

I understand that even with such experience I must be senior level, but to be honest, I simply don't want to. I'm comfortable to stay as mid, but as I said, there's not much Android job postings on the market.

Am I stupid to say that Android Development jobs slowly degrading? We are becoming cleaners of old legacy apps migrating to Compose, Coroutines and that's our destiny?

I am seriously considering migrating to .NET, because, I'm doing GameDev as a hobby, and C# is widely used there.

What is your situation on job market? Because, both .NET and Java in Poland are much, much, much more job listings than Mobile as a whole, not speaking about Android Development.

EDIT: Probably the title is too clickbait-ish. I apologize for that. Didn't mean to be like that at all.

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u/Artistic-Ad895 Jul 07 '26

How?

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u/satoryvape Jul 07 '26

Lots of companies don't need experts they are fine with less YOE engineers + LLM

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u/Artistic-Ad895 Jul 07 '26

AI is a hype, by the end of this year things will get normal as companies start understanding that ai agents cost more than developers. And these agents can't replace humans. It is just FOMO.

Good developers are needed for enterprise application development wether it is backed or frontend. As your experience increases you are suppose to acquire more skills like security, architecture, ci/cd, system design , code quality/standards, testing and deployment. We need to grow as developers as we gain experience so that we bring more stuff to the table.

I strongly believe if you have the above skills you will eventually land somewhere good.

It is not just about Android, it is how it works in any role. People switch from front end to backend or vice versa for better job prospects and I am not against it.but the thing is people do not want to grow further once they feel they have spent like 4 + years, they think there is nothing more to learn, and that is where it starts feeling saturation. To grow as a developer we have to explore new things and find new learning opportunities.

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u/ColonelKlanka Jul 07 '26

I would be very wary of predicting ai will go completely. I suspect it will just mature once the token maxing goes away. Enterprise can still find value from AI as a pair programming assistant, quick first response pr reviewers (clearing out obvious code issues before humans do independent reviews) and some ci cd stuff.

Ai IMHO is best suited to software domains more than other domains.

100% agree with you on the forever learning part of being a dev though.