[ganlaw]

As someone who has been doing primarily Android engineering for the last 7 years. I am not surprised they are still hiring Android people. It is really hard to hire Android people. Every company I’ve worked (FANNG included) at struggled to fill Android roles. TikTok has reached out to me every month for the last year or so as well.

[mrguyorama]

I did a minuscule amount of app development for android back in the like 4.0 days, and recently tried again, using kotlin and jetpack or whatever their UI kit is. It was awful. Everything is so hard to use. Your UI framework requires you to define completely separate """magic""" functions to preview how it is rendered, as if that makes any sense. All documentation seems to make the classic blunder of assuming you already know the answer, already are an expert in the platform, and already know what you are doing. Every example either hides some magic that they had to add, or requires you already know everything that the example should be teaching you.

I literally feel like I understand the Windows Win32 dev ecosystem, and I've never written a Windows app in my life.

[mattgreenrocks]

> It is really hard to hire Android people. Every company I’ve worked (FANNG included) at struggled to fill Android roles.

Why is that? Does iOS present similar hiring challenges?

[matwood]

It's been awhile, but I did both Android and iOS development for a product. iOS felt like a well thought out toolkit to build out very nice apps. Android was closer to here's a box of square legos, good luck. Getting to a polished app on Android was much harder [1].

Then there's the develop loop where the Android emulator is terrible, and the iOS simulator is great. So Android development meant constantly futzing with a device, which you really only want to have to do when you're ready really test.

[1] Games may be different since the game UI is often the same across platforms.

[0x457]

iOS's developers community had a head start - transitioning from Cocoa to Cocoa Touch is straightforward. Android didn't have this. Android SDK was a giant mess initially, there was no decent IDE for it initially, plenty of things that are `[something doThingWell]` in iOS are much harder in Android to implement.

Then there is fragmentation, availability of $50 devices that guaranteed to have issues with your app.

IMO iOS development is very pleasant (if you have someone other than you to deal with code signing) and Android isn't pleasant at all. Combine that with companies not caring about android apps... All of that contributes to a smaller number of good developers available.

[symlinkk]

Probably because anyone smart enough to work in tech is smart enough to have an iPhone instead of an Android