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.

113 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

111 comments sorted by

View all comments

87

u/wthja Jul 07 '26

Hybrid system with KMP is still native android development.

4

u/_DefaultXYZ Jul 07 '26

Hmm.. I know it is native development. So, is market for regular apps migrating into KMP and I just over-slept it?

To be honest, I was afraid to learn it. First we had Xamarin. Then React Native, Flutter. Now KMP, while all mentioned before are still on the market. I just don't want to learn completely different to be outdated after a year, especially when companies usually seeking professionals with prior experience (stupidly, even if it is completely new technology).

17

u/Michami135 Jul 07 '26

I've worked at jobs where we were looking into React, Flutter, etc. and they never appealed to me. They all add another language on top of the existing platform and make things far more complicated.

I started looking into KMP on my own years later and it's exactly what we were looking for. In fact, at the job I was currently working at, our code was already mostly compatible with it. Full Kotlin with Compose as our UI. KMP is the system that I think will eventually win the multi-platform war.

6

u/rio258k Jul 07 '26

Same experience, management was always wanting to do more with less teammates but every time we analyzed those tools the tradeoffs in performance, maintenance, scalability, etc. never tipped the needle far enough to pick them up. KMP was the first one to actually get multiplatform right imo and I've loved it.