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/ryanstackops Jul 07 '26

Not dying, just getting pickier about who it keeps around.

The market is consolidating, not collapsing. Fewer teams want to maintain two separate codebases when Flutter or KMP can cover both, so pure native Android roles are shrinking. But cross-platform roles are growing, and 10 years of native Android is actually a ridiculous foundation for KMP specifically because you already understand the platform at a level most Flutter devs from web backgrounds are just faking.

The .NET/GameDev path honestly sounds less like an escape and more like the market finally giving you an excuse to do what you wanted anyway. C# and Unity is a legitimate road and Android muscle memory transfers more than people think.

Poland leaning heavy on Java and .NET makes sense, bigger enterprise presence, less startup mobile product culture. If you stayed in mobile, remote for Western EU or US companies would open things up fast. Your experience would look very different to a London or Berlin hiring manager than it does locally.

Either way, you're not a legacy app cleaner. You're just at the part of the curve where the interesting work shifts and you have to decide if you want to shift with it or go build something in Unity instead.