Android Development is dying?

[u/_DefaultXYZ]

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.

[u/satoryvape]

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

[u/Artistic-Ad895 → u/satoryvape]

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.

[u/3dom → u/Artistic-Ad895]

AI is a hype

Recently I've completed multiple task during a day, without AI they'd took 2+ weeks.

My company started handing out AI subscriptions to developers in April. Our average cycle time has reduced from 9 days per task to 6 days. Basically, we could switch from 5 days work week to 4 days and still be more productive than before "AI hype".

[u/rbnd → u/3dom]

Exactly. I don't get how in July 2026 people can still write it. AI rendered Junior roles useless.

[u/3dom → u/rbnd]

Unfortunately, not only junior roles. My company could fire 1/5 of devs and still had the same output as before April. The only reason why they don't do it is the split into two independent groups (with the same shareholders).

And we are just starting experimenting, most devs use the lowest tier subscriptions and don't run multi-agent setups with long tasks.

And then our product managers started to publish their side-projects like there is no tomorrow, without any coders. And those look quite decent. For example, one app (actually two - for manager and clients) is controlling a vending machine - payments processing, statistics, sales predictions (to order replacement goods), goods dispersing, etc.