For the past 12 years I've been mostly developing for Android professionally (minus a brief 1 year stint writing code for a system based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3).
Other than LLMs the biggest change has been moving to Kotlin Compose from the old Android XML-based layout system.
LLMs are something I use often now and I'm not thrilled about this but it is what it is. I'm one of those people who prefer to hand craft code in a deep flow state so the move to LLMs has made me enjoy my job less, but it is hard to argue against the productivity gains so I try to be grateful that there was a long period where what I enjoyed doing and getting paid for were so well aligned. It isn't like my job is horrible now, it is just not quite as fun.
While I use agentic AI quite a bit, I don't "vibe code". Much of the software I currently write falls under various medical compliance systems (FDA, EMA, etc) and they rightfully expect us to understand and be personally responsible for the quality of the code we produce. Even absent the regulations, I still find it absolutely wild people ship code (associated with their name in any way) without looking at it.
I've been working for the same company for the past 5 years so I have little idea of how the career/interview side of things have changed recently. From anecdotal reports it seems like a giant mess of ghost jobs and competing with massive piles of AI-generated and AI-filtered resumes these days unless you have a strong network from the before times.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be worried about discoverability, I'm sure AI has made that worse but it was already a huge problem to get random apps noticed even before AI. The apps I currently work on professionally support external hardware devices that the apps control via bluetooth, so app store discoverability isn't a big concern (you buy the external device, then the documentation points you to the app store downloads).
I have also done app development as a non-commercial side project, writing a PvP game/stat tracking app for the game Destiny 2, this is a free app that has about a thousand users on iOS and a few hundred on Android, written in Kotlin Multiplatform. That started pre-LLM and I've continued to avoid using LLMs while working on it to make sure I can remember how to code sans LLMs, though the fact that Destiny 2 is stopping new development as of June 9th means I'm unlikely to put much effort into it going forward.
Other than LLMs the biggest change has been moving to Kotlin Compose from the old Android XML-based layout system.
LLMs are something I use often now and I'm not thrilled about this but it is what it is. I'm one of those people who prefer to hand craft code in a deep flow state so the move to LLMs has made me enjoy my job less, but it is hard to argue against the productivity gains so I try to be grateful that there was a long period where what I enjoyed doing and getting paid for were so well aligned. It isn't like my job is horrible now, it is just not quite as fun.
While I use agentic AI quite a bit, I don't "vibe code". Much of the software I currently write falls under various medical compliance systems (FDA, EMA, etc) and they rightfully expect us to understand and be personally responsible for the quality of the code we produce. Even absent the regulations, I still find it absolutely wild people ship code (associated with their name in any way) without looking at it.
I've been working for the same company for the past 5 years so I have little idea of how the career/interview side of things have changed recently. From anecdotal reports it seems like a giant mess of ghost jobs and competing with massive piles of AI-generated and AI-filtered resumes these days unless you have a strong network from the before times.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be worried about discoverability, I'm sure AI has made that worse but it was already a huge problem to get random apps noticed even before AI. The apps I currently work on professionally support external hardware devices that the apps control via bluetooth, so app store discoverability isn't a big concern (you buy the external device, then the documentation points you to the app store downloads).
I have also done app development as a non-commercial side project, writing a PvP game/stat tracking app for the game Destiny 2, this is a free app that has about a thousand users on iOS and a few hundred on Android, written in Kotlin Multiplatform. That started pre-LLM and I've continued to avoid using LLMs while working on it to make sure I can remember how to code sans LLMs, though the fact that Destiny 2 is stopping new development as of June 9th means I'm unlikely to put much effort into it going forward.